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.