ESL Games - The Five Most Popular ESL Games

<b> Forum for discussing activities and games that work well in the classroom </b>

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lip420
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ESL Games - The Five Most Popular ESL Games

Post by lip420 » Sat Sep 03, 2011 1:40 am

Here's an article on popular ESL games.
Last edited by lip420 on Mon Jun 01, 2015 8:50 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Sally Olsen
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Post by Sally Olsen » Sat Sep 03, 2011 3:29 am

Too bad about Bingo. I found it great. By chance I had brought some bingo games from Canada to Mongolia. Each card had pictures of vocabulary on it but the vocabulary was mixed up with bread, truck, giraffe, and so on in the squares. So I cut them all apart and got extra pictures from any book I could find and on the Internet, put them on the same size cardboard to make more squares.

Then I put categories together depending on our curriculum - animals, transportation, rooms of the apartment (very few houses in Erdenet), kitchen utensils and so on and stored them in plastic containers.

I used the Xerox machine to blow up the pictures so I had a teacher's set to show from the front of the class and I made pocket charts to hold them (at first I just hung them on a line from the top of the board with clothes pegs which worked OK as well. The students would come up and get enough squares to make a bingo board of five across and five down. They couldn't pick a square with the same first letter so no alligator and ant in the same card. (I learned that quickly after the smart ones got just one or two letters and won consistently.)

You can comment on their 'cards' while you wait for them to get the squares - Which one is your favourite? Do you have ? in Mongolia (the camel and yak went in domestic animals there).

Each picture had the word underneath it but over the week or so we played one category, like Animals, and I started to use cards that didn't have the word and then didn't have the picture, just the word.

Then I shuffled a pack of alphabet cards and called out a letter. Whoever had an animal (kitchen utensil) with that letter called out the name of it and I wrote it on the board under the appropriate letter. I also circled the letter so slower ones could check back to make sure they got all their cards. (This sounds easy but I could tell you stories about the brown boards we had that only worked with wet chalk).

I played until the first three won and handed out coloured pencils as prizes but at the end of the week I played until everyone won.

We also used the squares for matching games and put the animals in alphabetical order and so on.

It seemed to be a great way to introduce vocabulary and they never tired of it. It took longer the first day of week but only 10 minutes of the last period of the week.

The rest of the time we made stories about animals, looked up interesting facts, compared methods of moving, eating, habitat, drew pictures to make a book with a sentence underneath the picture and so on. (We only had 20 books in English in the library and 10 of those were "Shilo").

As a benefit I learned a lot of words in Mongolian because they would call out the Mongolian name as soon as they saw the picture and then try the English and often the Russian. Toward the end of the week they would call out different facts - kangaroos hop, horses gallop, trot, and so on.

I guess I should mention that the principal always said I had such a noisy class because they were all talking - at first a lot in Mongolian - asking if they could trade cards or which cards they had and so on but gradually a lot more in English.

Oh, they just turned the square over when I called their letter. The winner had to call out the animals they got to make sure the letter had been called (but often got a lot of help from friends for the pronunciation). One boy played in Mongolian the whole semester - what can you do?

gotravelenglish
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Post by gotravelenglish » Sat Sep 03, 2011 6:40 am

I just started teaching as an ALT in Japan and was warned about hangman in the classroom. We should modify mainly because it is the topic of death. However, the English textbook they use has some pretty heavy topics in it. Interesting stuff.

mesmark
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Post by mesmark » Tue Sep 13, 2011 1:10 pm

Sally Olsen wrote:Too bad about Bingo. I found it great. ...
I'm sure that I don't have to convince Sally, but just about any game can be transformed into an interesting, educational, communicative activity. If in bingo you are just calling out words and people are marking squares, well then it's not much better than Chinese Whispers :P (That is if you aren't taking that activity very far either.)

Bingo can be a question and answer activity. Bingo can be played as Taboo. Bingo can require students to use the word in a sentence. In bingo students can create a narrative as each word comes up. Really, it's up to the teacher to make the activity interesting and educational.

Be proactive and don't feel as though you need to find a great game. You just need to make a good game great!

Happy teaching,
Mark

ESL Games
Last edited by mesmark on Sat Nov 12, 2011 9:04 am, edited 2 times in total.

mesmark
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Post by mesmark » Tue Sep 13, 2011 1:20 pm

gotravelenglish wrote:I just started teaching as an ALT in Japan and was warned about hangman in the classroom. We should modify mainly because it is the topic of death.
You could have someone in the class that had a relative or friend kill themselves by hanging. It certainly can be a sensitive topic.

What I've done is drawn a jail and when the bars are all in place then I draw a sad face behind the bars. The kids love it.

Expanding on hangman. You could just have students call letters and make a word. ... Or you could have students call a letter and tell you how it's read. Or they could give you 2 words that start with that letter, for example. Once the word is out, students can make 5 sentences with the word. Students can write words for each letter in the puzzle word and get an extra point if they are the fastest, best, can use all of the words in one sentence, ...

Hippo
Angry
Net
Game
Monkey
Animal
Nice

"I met a nice hippo that became angry playing a game on the Net with another animal."

English Games Online

lip420
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The 5 Best ESL Games & Activities

Post by lip420 » Fri Mar 23, 2012 5:09 pm

Well everything that's popular isn't necessarily good. So I made this follow up article entitled, "The 5 best ESL games and activities".

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