What's the Meaning?

You, the teacher, may need a dictionary do this activity.

• Choose a word which is long, difficult, and unknown to the students, a good word to begin with is: warmonger.
• Without using a dictionary, your students write down a definition. (They can work out the definition in groups of three).  Allow them a few minutes to think and write.
• Collect the definitions and read them aloud.
• When you have finished reading, they will have to vote which of those is the correct one. (It doesn't matter if none of them is the correct one) 
• After they have voted and none of the groups guessed the meaning you read the correct one aloud.

The idea of this game is to let students be creative and practice writing skills.
Then you can have the students to discuss their writings.

Spelling Contest

First, if you have a large class you have to divide it in 2 teams, then the teacher says a word or a sentence depending on the level for the students to spell.

Students should spell these correctly with not even one mistake. The team that has more points is the winner

Pictionary (Game 1) - Charades (Game 2)

Write out series of categories like professions (doctor, bus driver, etc.), animals, foods, actions (fishing, haircut, etc.) then divide the class into groups of 2. 

One student draws and the other guesses. Next turn, the guesser draws and drawer guesses. This game works best with the arbitrary stop watch (30 seconds). This is designed for one lesson.

Then for another day take the same categories (or create new ones) and play the same game except students, this time, act it out (no speaking or noises). 

Battle Ships - A Vocabulary Game

Preparation:
Divide the students in to groups of four or five. Then ask the student to make the name for their ships for example with the names of animals, cities, movie stars or let them find their own favourite names.
Ask them to choose the Captain and the Shooter. The captain's duty is to memorize his ship's name, so he can reply if somebody call his ship's name. The shooter's duty is to memorize the names of the ships of 'their enemies', so he can shoot them by calling their ship's name.

Activity:
Arrange all the captains in a circle, the ships' crews must line up behind their captains. The shooter is the last crew member in line.

The teacher must decide a lexical area of vocabulary, this vocabulary will be used to defend their ships from the attacks. Every students (except the shooters) must find their own words. The lexical area for example, "Four Legged Animals". Give the students 1-2 minutes to find as many possible words as they can and memorize them.

Start the game by calling a ship's name, for example the ship name is "THE CALIFORNIAN". The captain of THE CALIFORNIAN must reply with a word from the lexical area given, for example he says "TIGER" followed by his crews behind him one by one, "COW"; "SHEEP" until it  is the shooter turns and he calls out the name of another ship and the captain of the ship called must reply and his crews must do the same thing. No word can be repeated.

If the captain is late to reply (more than 2 seconds) or his crew can not say the words or a word repeated or the shooter shoots the wrong ship (his own ship or the ship that has already been sunk) the ship is sunk, and the crew members can join the crew of another ship.

The teacher can change the lexical area for the next round.

In the last round there will be two big groups battling to be the winner.

Secret Code

I sometimes give instructions to my students written in code that they have to interpret before completing tasks. I've used this at various levels:

Here's an example: to revise alphabet and simple present verbs/vocab.

• ·        Tell students the code e.g. each code letter represents the letter that comes before it in the alphabet ‘a’ is ‘b’, ‘m’ is ‘n’, 'dbu' is cat etc. 
• ·        Then they decode their message and do the task: 

o   xbml up uif cpbse - walk to the board 

o   kvnq ufo ujnft - jump ten times

To make it more difficult, I've...

• ·        Used more complex codes,
• ·        Let them work the code out for themselves,
• ·        Have not defined where words end,
• ·        Have given more complicated tasks or vocabulary
• ·        Or given them half an instruction which they must decode and then find the classmate with the other half of their task information.

This activity can be used to review or practice vocabulary or structure or simply be a different way to introduce the topic for the day's class - each student gets one or two words to decode and then the class work to put all the words together.

Toilet Paper Icebreaker

This activity is used as a "getting to know you", icebreaker on the first day of class.

Teacher takes the toilet paper roll and takes several squares of toilet paper, then hands the roll of toilet paper to a student.

• The teacher tells the student to take some, more than three.
• After everybody in the class has some paper, we count the squares we have, then we have to tell that many things about ourselves, in English. 

 This activity works well with substitute teachers also. The toilet paper is such an attention getter.