Teacher Discussion Forums

I teach in a school where my classe are about 50-60 students, and I'm trying to figure out some basic games to play, either to drive points home about the lesson, or to kill the last ten minutes of a class.
Does anyone have any suggestions for such large class sizes?

How old are your students?

Here's an idea - I did this once with a big group of 15 year olds : Tell them they have to form a line according to their date of birth - January the first at one end and December 31st at the other. 2 rules : they only have 3 minutes (or whatever) and they must ask questions only in English.

Blow a whistle and stand well back

they are all about 14-16 years old (senior 1/grade 10)

Here are some things that I think work well with large groups:

dictation - The book Dictation is an excellent resource.
songs and music
drills (not too often)
pairwork and groupwork
role play (first in pairs or groups, then students perform in front of the class)

Another book Teaching Large Multilevel Classes has some very good ideas.

This is a great time filler game. It's basically only useful for vocab review, but it gets high school kids excitied:

Be genki,

Richard
http://www.GenkiEnglish.com



Shiritori!
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Target English: Any written English
Target grade: Elem 4 to adults


This is a great warm up game for older elementary or junior high kids!

1. Split the kids into groups.

2. Start the stopwatch

3. The front person from each group writes a word on the board e.g. "fish"

4. The next person from the group comes up and writes a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word. e.g. if the last word was "fish" the new word could be "hotel" or "house"

5. Repeat from 4

6. When the time is up, see which team has the most words!

Of course higher level kids should come up with higher level words!

It's great to play some loud music when the kids are doing this game! You could also decide to give 2 marks for longer or cooler words!!
http://www.genkienglish.net/shiritori.htm

Hangman, the kids love it, single words are good as you, the teacher can win. Sentences are fun too. I usually use words that I have taught in the class that day. Just make sure they don't all scream out letters to you at once.

Here is a game that has worked very well with 10 to 14 year olds. It is a variation of an American TV show, which I think is called Wheel of Fortune.

I write the alphabet on the board to show available letters. I then come up with a phrase or statement and indicate this by a series of dashes and / to seperate the words. Team 1 selects a letter. If correct, you insert the letter into the phrase and they get another turn. If not, on to the next team. With each miss, letters comes off the available list.

My kids ask to play this game often.

Good luck with it.