People to People

Materials: none

Description: This is a good game to review body parts. You need lots of room for the students to walk around and mingle, without desks in the way. To play the game, everyone stands up and walks around the area. The teacher then yells “People to People,” and everyone partners up with the person closest to them. The teacher also yells out two body parts (adjust to your student’s level of vocabulary), like “Hand to Foot.” The partners then have to touch those two body parts together (Vlado’s hand on Misho’s foot, and Misho’s hand on Vlado’s foot).  You can also yell out the same body part twice, like “Ear to Ear,” and they would have to stick their ears together.  As soon as everyone is touching body parts, tell them “Go!” and they can detach and start milling around again, looking for new partners. There will be a lot of giggling as people are trying to touch elbows to noses and whatnot, but be warned – some students might not be comfortable touching a member of the opposite sex. Segregate your class if needed.

-Nikola O.

Reverse Team Pictionary

Materials: whiteboard and markers, pictures

Description: Create or find pictures to use. This game is best if there are several things in each picture. As an example, I’ll use teaching prepositions of place. The pictures can be unrealistic and fun, as long as the students know all the words. In one picture, show a big elephant behind a small house, 3 little birds on a rock, two big mountains behind the elephant and a girl above the mountains in a helicopter.

Explain the instructions very clearly. This is important! Divide the students into 4 groups and divide the board into 4 sections. Have each team stand in front of their section. Each group should elect one person to draw. The drawer may not turn around; he/she must be facing the board at all times. Hand the picture to the students who are not drawing. They must hold the picture so the drawer is unable to see it. Very important: all students may only speak in English. Any Bulgarian is grounds for disqualification.

The students with the picture must describe the picture to the drawer, exactly as it appears. This means that the elephant must be big and the house small, and there must be 3 birds. The first drawer to accurately draw the picture gets a point. Another option: the first team gets 4 points, the 2nd team 3, etc. Each team needs a new person to draw, and hand out a new picture.

-Chantelle K.

Learning Numbers Using Cards

Materials: one deck of cards for each group

Description: This works best in small groups, no more than 3. Aces count as 1 and all face cards start out as 10. You can change this when practicing bigger numbers. When learning numbers 1-10, students place deck of cards in the middle. One student flips the top card over. The first student to correctly say the number gets to keep the card.

When learning numbers up to 20, the cards are divided in half, and 2 cards are flipped over. The student who correctly says the sum of both cards gets to keep them. When learning numbers up to 100, have students flip over 2 cards, which must be multiplied.

The game is over when the deck runs out. The student with the greatest number of cards is the winner.

– Chantelle K.

Free Write

Materials: an egg timer/stopwatch/clock, paper and pens

Description: This is based on the idea suggested by research which states that the number of words a student can write in 5 minutes is an indication of fluency and ability in a foreign language. The generally accepted number is 100 words in 5 minutes.

At the beginning of the year, give students 10 minutes to write a story or essay. Lower level students, particularly at the beginning, might benefit from being given a specific topic to write about, or a certain character. At the end of the time limit, have students count the number of English words they have written in their story. When 80-90% of your students have written 100 words or more, cut down the time, usually by 15-45 seconds. If a student has more than 75 words in English, that’s pretty good. 50? Halfway there! When 100% of your students can write a 100-word story in 5 minutes or less, treat them to something special!

Suggestions:
1. Tell your students that if they don’t know a word in English, it’s okay to write that one word in Bulgarian and the rest of the words in the sentence in English.
2. Spelling and grammar don’t count. You’re measuring fluency with this exercise, not accuracy. Knowing this will help alleviate some student stress.
3. Remind students that writing 1 word one hundred times doesn’t count.
4. I allow students to count names and other proper nouns, because they are part of natural language use, as long as they are written in English.
5. It’s interesting to hang on to these for the year to look at how students have progressed. If you work closely with the teacher who teaches the next level/grade, pass them along so he or she has an idea of your students’ ability. If you do this, make sure the students write the time limit at the top in addition to the number of words they have written.

-Chantelle K.

Greatest Bad Ideas

Materials: about 30 index cards, or cut up pieces of paper about the same size.

Description: First take the cards or pieces of paper and write hypothetical “problems” on them (eg. “My winter coat is not warm enough”, “I can’t afford to pay my rent”, “My cat makes me sneeze”, or something more absurd like “My doctor scares me”).

Explain to your students that you need their advice, but that they should avoid giving you obvious advice, and try instead to give you strange or stupid advice. Provide examples like: “If your winter coat is not warm enough, you should pour hot coffee in the pockets”; “If your pants are too big you should gain 50 pounds by only eating cake”; If your nose is too big you should have surgery to make the rest of your face bigger”, etc.

Even if your students have to struggle to express these ideas, it’s a good exercise, and is almost always solidly entertaining. Variation: Let your students read out the problems, role playing that they are their own, then solicit the advice of other students, coaching them as needed.

-Lauren M.

Spelling Race with Cards

Materials: a set of alphabet flash cards for each team playing (either cards sent from the states, or you can make them here)

Description: Break the class into teams. Word to the wise: you might want to spread the teams out as far as possible to avoid accusations of cheating. Each team is given a set of cards, which they can spread out on their desks or tables. When the teams are ready, give them a word to spell with the cards. Each team who spells it correctly gets a point, and the team that does it first gets an extra one. Play until you run out of words, or the students are bored.

Just remember, if you have sets of 26 cards, make sure you only give the students words with no double letters in them. If you make your own cards, you can give them extra vowels or whatever, but the more cards you give them, the more cards they have to sort through to find what they’re looking for. Either way, make sure you prepare a list of words beforehand that they can spell with the cards they are given.

-Abeth S.

Battleship

Materials: white board and white board markers, or paper and regular markers

Description: This is a good game for young beginners, because it doesn’t use a lot of English, and they have a lot of fun trying to figure out where the ships are. It can also be used as a reward game. To set up the game, draw a grid of about 6 by 6 (larger for longer games, smaller for shorter ones). You can either draw this grid on the whiteboard, or on a blank sheet of paper. Label rows and columns with whatever you like: numbers, letters, colors, animals, food, etc. I like using colors and numbers. Draw the same grid in a notebook or on a scrap paper for your own reference, but this time, hide some ships in the squares.

When you’re ready to play, go over the English words for “ship” and “water.” Then tell the students that you have X amount of ships hiding in the ocean, and they will take turns to guess where they are. Students guess a square by calling out the coordinates (like “blue-five” or “pink-three”) and, using your notebook chart for reference, tell them either: “No, sorry. Water!” or “Yes! A ship!” Then draw either a ship or some waves in the square, so they know which ones they’ve guessed. The students win when all the ships are uncovered.

You can also let the students have a turn hiding the ships and telling the class “water” or “ship,” but it’s up to you if you help them, or if you sit back and take a turn trying to guess. I’ve also broken the kids up into two teams and let the teams hide the ships. Then I played against both teams at once, trying to find all their ships. It was a little confusing, but it worked.

Also, younger students really like it when you “ham it up” and add dramatic sound effects and over-acting when they find a ship or water. My class really liked the sound effect “sploosh” for water, and now they ask every day to play the “Sploosh Game!”

-Abeth S.

Telephone Numbers

Materials: Small scraps of paper, pens

Description: To begin, you need a lot of phone numbers. If your students have their own numbers that they’d like to learn in English, you can use those. Otherwise, make up a bunch of phone numbers. Whether you’re using real or fake numbers, you need to write each number twice – on two scraps of paper. Each student gets one number, and the copies of these numbers go into a bag or a hat.

Here’s how it works. Explain to the students that you’re going to be calling each other on the phone. Write a telephone dialog (tailored to your student’s level) on the board and discuss any unknown words or phrases. Then you pull a number out of the hat, and “call” it. Do this by reading each number slowly and clearly. The students follow along on their slips of paper, and the person who has the same number that you just read out “answers” the phone. The two of you act out the dialog from the board, and then “hang up.” You can then pull a new number out of the bag, or let the person who just answered the phone be the next caller. This game is good because it forces everyone to listen for their telephone number. After a while, if you want to alter the dialog, or improvise your own, you can.

-Abeth S.