Martian

Tell your class you are a Martian and you are inhabiting a human body to study human ways. You then ask about virtually anything in the room, and ask follow up questions: What is this? It's a pen. What's a "pen"? You use it to write. What is "write"? You make words with it on paper. What are "words"? ETC... You can make it as difficult as possible for your higher level students; at some point, though, you'll need to say "OK, I understand", and go to the next object. Even your best students will eventually get stuck on this one!

Spin Zone

Each set of partners receives a top. One learner says as many sentences or words in the target language as he can before the top stops spinning. His partner counts. The student who says the most words wins. We had fun letting the winners compete in "spin offs". I like to give stickers to all and candy to the winner!

Suppose That

This works well as a fluency activity

1. You are the black sheep of your family. Explain to us why.
2. You won a motorcycle and you are planning to embark on a voyage. Explain where you go.
3. You arrive face to face with a person who you owe 100 dollars to. What do you say?
4. You help an old woman across the street. It turns out that she is a magician. To thank you, she offers you four wishes. What do you ask for?
5. You arrive home at midnight, you open the door and ......

Acting Adverbs

This activity is a great way to introduce the idea of how adverbs affect the way a verb action is done. Divide the blackboard in two and write as many verbs on one side and as many adverbs on the other as you can (get the class to come up with them). At this stage you can also teach how adjectives 'turn into' adverbs by writing down adjectives e.g. angry, happy, and adding the 'ily'. Then divide the class into two teams and perhaps give them goofy team names (I find they enjoy giving each other names). Then get one team to choose a verb and adverb combination and the other team has to act it out, e.g. talk crazily.

My experience with this activity has been with younger learners where some kind of reward is offered at the end like stamps or being the first team to leave at the end of class. You can think of your own reward (or penalty) to motivate your class. It can be a lot of fun with both the actors and the 'directors' enjoying making fools out of themselves or watching others make fools of themselves. 

Getting to Know a Little More about Your Classmates

The teacher gives every student a piece of paper on which they write a sentence about their personal life. This sentence can be about school, family, music, friends, the last vacation, etc. For example, "I went to the beach last vacation" or "I always study for my exams" or "I have two brothers" etc. When they finish writing their sentences they fold the paper and give it to the teacher.

It is very important to tell students before writing the sentence that the information they are going to write is "a secret" and not to show it to their classmates. If they have a question about something, they should ask it to you instead of a classmate. Tell students to write their names on the papers.

After collecting all the papers, ask the students to write the numbers from one to 10 (or 20, depending on the number of students you have in that moment in the classroom) in their notebooks. After that, the teacher reads the sentences in random order (without saying the name of the student), and the students write the names of the people they think wrote sentences.

After reading all the sentences, say the question number and read the sentence again for each piece of paper and ask the students to name who they thought wrote it.

Then tell the students the name from the student who wrote that sentence. Students should write (C) for correct guesses and (I) for incorrect guesses.

This is one way for students to start knowing a little more about their classmates. 

Ball Game

Students stand up in a circle around the teacher. 

A ball is tossed to a student and the teacher asks a question, e.g.: "Say a color". The student then responds and throws the ball back to the teacher.The teacher then throws the ball to another student and asks another question. For higher levels, you can ask such questions like "Give me the past participle of an irregular verb".

This is a fast game, and it is great for reviewing vocabulary. 

Human Bingo - Getting to Know You Activity

Have the students divide an 8.5" x 11" paper into 9 squares (two vertical lines / two horizontal lines. The middle square is the "free" space. Next, put a list of 5 questions on the board (these can vary in difficulty). For example:

1. What is your name?
2. Where are you from?
3. How long have you been in the USA?
4. What is the strangest thing you have eaten here?
5. (they make a question)

The students must then interview 8 different people in the class to fill in the bingo page. Each square on the paper represents one person's answers. When they have written all the answers from one person, they go on to someone else until all of the boxes on the paper are filled. When everyone has finished, the teacher uses the class list to call off names. For example, if the teacher says, "Who has Rodrigo?", the students who interviewed Rodrigo would then provide the answers he gave to the bingo questions.
It's a fun game that gets students speaking right away. It usually takes a while to complete.

What's Your Name?

One student sits in the front of the classroom (usually in the teacher's comfortable chair) with his back to the other students. The teacher then points to students in the class and asks "What's your name?" The student indicated must respond "My name is__________" with either his own name or the name of someone in the class. The student in the front cannot see who is speaking. The teacher says to him, "Is it___________?" and he must say "Yes, it is" or "No, it isn't". If the student in front is correct, he gets to stay there, but if he's mistaken, he changes place with the student who fooled him.

To make the game more interesting, the students are encouraged to disguise their voices.

I always do this with my beginners at the beginning of the year, but always at the end of the class, and for not more than 5 to 10 minutes. (My beginners are elementary age.)

Survivor Spelling Game

Use this activity to review vocabulary:

Make a list of vocabulary covered in previous lessons. Have students stand. Call out a vocabulary word. The first student begins by saying the word and giving the first letter, the second student the second letter of the word, the third student the third letter, and so on until the word is spelled correctly. If somebody makes a mistake they must sit down and we start from the beginning again until the word is spelled correctly. The last student must then pronounce the word correctly and give a definition in order to stay standing. The student who is left standing is the "survivor" and wins the game. I usually give them some type of prize. If all the students remain standing we have a pizza party at the end of the week.

The students love it and it is a great way to practice vocabulary!!!

Alphabet Liar Game

Take a pack of letter cards, mixed up. It is better if it is not a complete alphabet, and there are some duplicate cards.

Deal all the cards out to the players:

Students take it in turns to play cards face down. They must go through the alphabet, starting from 'A', playing one card face down and saying the letters in Alphabetical order.

Even if they do not have the card to be played for that turn, they must play any card and pretend it is the card they said. Say the sequence has gone A,B. The next player must play a card and say C, even if he has not got an C.

If any player does not believe that someone has played the real card, he can say: "You're a liar" and turns the card over. If the card has the letter which was said, the challenger picks up all the cards. If it is not, the liar picks up all the cards in the pile. The winner is the first one to finish all their cards.

Think Fast

A game for revision (review). It also works well for the last 5 minutes of class

The teacher prepares a list of items for revision e.g. word fields, grammar, facts. In class he/she explains the procedure. Three to five volunteers leave the classroom and wait till their turn has come. The teacher appoints a student to take the exact time and another to take down a tick for every correct answer. No repetitions! (Set up or negotiate rules on pronunciation.) Then the first player is called in.

• Teacher: You have 20 second to name as many things as come to your mind.
• Your topic: Parts of the body / London sights / plays by William Shakespeare / the places in a town / traffic signs / weekend shopping-list / etc.
• Ready, steady, go

Once all volunteers have done their bit, award a small prize (e.g. a sticker) to the winner of the round. 

Then ask the class for additions before you pick the next item. Then pick the next item.
Allow more time (30 or 40 seconds) for longer answers: What have you done so far today? / What did you do last weekend? / School rules: What do students have to do? What are they not allowed to do?, etc.

If this game is played in groups, they should be evenly balanced.

Guessing the Word from a Drawing

• Ask one student to be in front of the class. Give him/her a word that can not be seen by other students.
• He/she will draw (on the blackboard) a picture expressing the concept of the word.
• The rest of the class have to guess the word.
• If you are keeping score, the one who drew the picture gets the point if the class can guess the word.

Descriptions

• Write down names of every student in your class on pieces of paper.
• Give the names to students. Try to make two students describe each other.
• Ask them to describe the person whose name is on the paper.
• After they finish, give the description to the person who is described. He/she has to find any writing mistakes on the paper.
• Students work in pairs to correct the two papers.

Fold-over Stories

This is an old favorite. Give each student a sheet of blank paper. Write the following words on the board in a vertical line: WHO, WHAT, HOW, WHERE, WHEN, WHY. Explain that everyone will be writing a sentence story. 

Write an example on the board, explain, asking for suggestions.

1. Tell them to write someone's name at the top of their paper, i.e., their own, a classmate's, the teacher's, a famous person that everyone knows; fold the paper over in half once so no one can see it, then pass the paper to the person on their right.
2. Write on the received paper what the subject did (suggest funny or outrageous actions), fold it over and pass it on to the right.
3. Continue to write one line, how they did it (adverbs), fold and pass; where-pass; when-pass; and last of all, why (because...) and pass it one more time.
4. Have the students unfold their stories, and read them silently. Help anyone who cannot read what the others wrote, or doesn't understand.
5. Ask one student at a time to read "their" story aloud, or turn the stories in for the teacher to read. Funny!

Can You Find What Is Different?

Ask a volunteer to go out of the classroom. While the student is out of the room, the other students change their sweaters, shoes, coats and so on. Bring the student who went out of the classroom back inside. He/she has to guess the differences (speaking in English, of course.)

Headmaster Game

Have each student take out a piece of paper and their dictionary. Write on the board:

You are the new headmaster of this school. You have two years to make this the perfect school. You can have as much money as you want, but you must spend it all in 2 years.

• What changes would you make immediately?
• What changes must be gradual?
• What would you do to make it a better school?
• What changes would you make?

Be specific. For example, don't say hire better teachers. You must say how you would find better teachers or what kind of teachers you would hire. Also, remember you must think like a headmaster, not like a student! Making school easy and letting the students do no exams or homework will not make parents happy!

Give the students 15 minutes to work alone. Then put them in groups of 3-5 with a leader to organize their thoughts. Each group's leader will give its "report" to the other students during the following class period.
If your students have a small vocabulary you can help them out by listing on the blackboard areas of discussion: teachers, buildings, classrooms, activities, dorms, lunchrooms,curriculum, sports, playground, library, bathrooms,schedules,music, art,etc.

This is a great activity for all ages. We always run out of time!

Vacation Cards

For this activity you will need a deck of cards, and an imaginative theme that could be crafted into some sort of story. For example, I choose "send the teacher on a vacation". On the board or overhead projector make a list like the following. (You could ask your student for imput.)

• A-exciting
• 2-depressing
• 3-expensive
• 4-heroic
• 5-romantic
• 6-fantastic
• 7-sad
• 8-almost fatal
• 9-cheap
• 10-dramatic
• J-happy
• Q-wierd
• K-change one option

Prompt the students a little to get them started; perhaps offer a beginning to the story. They then must continue making an oral story by drawing one card and continuing the story along those lines. For example, if they get 4, then the teacher/protagonist must do something heroic or some kind of heroric event must occur. If the students draw a K (or whatever card you stipulate), then they can change one option. This seems to help keep the momentum in the game. Continue through all cards, with the stipulation that the story must be concluded by the end of the deck. Obviously there is a lot of room for variation here. Your word list and theme could be related to your unit of study. 

My students really enjoyed this game; it is most interesting if you personalize it and insert yourself or a student (assuming he/she wouldn't mind).

Act Out an Activity

This is a game-like activity to teach continous tense.

One student simply acts out some activity (e.g.cooking) and the other students guess what that student is doing. The student who guesses correctly acts out another acitvity...

Words Beginning with a Given Letter

The teacher chooses a letter from the alphabet. Then each student must say a word that begins with that letter. If a student repeats a word that has already been said, then he/she is out of the game. The game ends when only one student remains. That student is the winner. In high level classes students lose if they say a past form of the verb. Example:see-saw.

You can increase the difficulty by adding a timer. Only allow each student 5 seconds to think of a word.

Taboo

This game is a simplified version of the board game "Taboo".

Before class, create several index cards. On each card write one word in a large font with a circle around it, and underneath write 2-4 related words in a smaller font. The goal is for students to get their teammates to guess the circled word. They can say anything they like to try to make them guess, except for the words written on the card.

Divide the class into groups of two, and write each group on the board to keep track of points. Place a desk in the front of the room facing the class, so that someone sitting it has their back to the board and can't read it. Place another desk in front of it, so the teammates are facing eachother.

Pick a team to go first, and have them choose a card. Have the teammates decide who will guess and who will talk. The guesser sits with their back to the board. On the board, making sure the guesser can't see, write the circled word as well as the other taboo words. The talker then has to try to make their partner guess the circled word without saying it, or any of the other words. After they guess it have another group come up. When all the groups have gone, do it again and have the teammates switch roles.

My students really enjoy this game, so much so that they often give the guesser clues even when it is not their team! It's a great way for students to practice forming sentences, and it forces them to use words and structures they might otherwise not use.