Games and fun activities play important role during the lessons of English language. It doesn’t matter if we’re teaching adults or children, games will liven up your lesson and ensure that your students will leave the classroom wanting more.
Games can be used to warm up the class before your lesson begins, during the lesson to give students a break when you’re tackling a tough subject, or at the end of class when you have a few minutes left to kill. There are many games that we can play with students.
Guess the word
Split the class into 2 teams, or more if you have a large class.
Elect one person from each team to sit in the Hot Seat, facing the classroom with the board behind them.
Write a word on the board. One of the team members of the student in the hot seat must help the student guess the word by describing it. They have a limited amount of time and cannot say, spell or draw the word.
Continue until each team member has described a word to the student in the Hot Seat.
Health and illness
Write ailments or problems related to your most recent lesson on post-it notes and stick one post-it note on each student’s back.
The students must mingle and ask for advice from other students to solve their problem.
Students should be able to guess their problem based on the advice they get from their peers.
Use more complicated or obscure problems to make the game more interesting for older students. For lower levels and younger students, announce a category or reference a recent lesson, like "Health", to help them along.
Make up sentences
This game requires some planning before the lesson.
Write out a number of sentences, using different colors for each sentence. I suggest having 3-5 sentences for each team.
Cut up the sentences so you have a handful of words.
Put each sentence into hats, cups or any objects you can find, keeping each separate.
Split your class into teams of 2, 3, or 4. You can have as many teams as you want but remember to have enough sentences to go around.
Teams must now put their sentences in the correct order.
The winning team is the first team to have all sentences correctly ordered.
Bingo
Bingo is an appropriate game to play with students because it can work with any age and skill level. You can play the traditional version of bingo using numbers, or you can purchase special bingo boards that use letters or words in place of the numbers.
Scrabble Jr.
In Scrabble, players take a certain number of tiles and then use those tiles to create words. This may be too difficult for new learners and young students, so Scrabble Jr. may be a better solution for them. There are pre-printed words on one side of the board, and students are allowed to place two letters at a time to create words. Whoever finishes the word gets the point. The other side of the board is blank, which allows more advanced students to make their own words.
