Teacher Discussion Forums

I have learned lots of games and hands-on activities for teaching High School foreign language students (French and Spanish). What are good games and activities for elementary ESL students?

There is an answer in this forum at the very top called a Sticky on Activities and Games.

Hi Mgallen,

I use games and activities all the time with my elem and middle school students- I find there's no better way to motivate them. You can go to my website below and on the landing page is a free downloadable page of activities that you can use with your elementary students. Good Luck!
Steph

Check out and comment on the effects of the uber-fast-pace of life in the US @ www.bilinguallearner.com/-blog!

I have taught primarily around that age range. Here you'll find a number of ESL games and activities for teaching children.

I teach mostly adults but they enjoy games as much as kids. There are a few vocabulary games I often use to help them remember words, like Vocabulary Chains or Brainstorm. The best part, you can adjust them to any topic or level, and there's hardly any preparation time. I wrote about them in detail in an article on using games http://dobrygnomik.ru/activities-for-te ... eparation/

Hello there,
I teach English to the Japanese children (age 6-12). I am expected to develop only their listening and speaking skills. (Reading and writing come later- in the middle school )
I had to learn a lot of games for large and small classes.
My favourite one is COLOUR WOLF . It is good for revising colours or articles of clothing (or any vocabulary) Small group variant :
The wolf shouts out a colour. All the children wearing this colour are safe. The wolf has 10 seconds to catch the other kids who are not wearing the colour (or an item of clothing). Use a whistle to let the kids know when the time is up. The students caught become the wolves. If the wolf cannot catch anyone after 3 turns change them over.
Large group variant : The wolf stands at the front of the classroom facing the board, the other students stand up at their desks. The wolf shouts out the colour. All the children wearing it get eaten and sit down.
You can use any vocabulary and any structure for this game.
All students draw pictures of the vocabulary of your choice - food for example. The wolf mimes an action of eating and says I am eating an apple - all the kids who`ve chosen this card sit down.

Another good game for small and large classes is called Chinese Whispers. It is good to revise any vocabulary or language structure. Divide your class into groups and give each of them different messages to pass. For example , team A gets the phrase John does n`t like apples . to pass. One child starts of whispering the words to the person next to them
who whispers it in turn to the person next and so on. The last child speaks out loud the message.
The team who passes the message properly gets a point which
keeps the students motivated to do their best.
I `ve found these games on the website www.teachingenglishgames.com

Good luck ,

Ewelina

Hi,
When I had to lead several conversational elementary groups at an upper secondary school in the Czech Republic I used this book form: http://www.amazon.co.uk/ESL-Games-Langu ... 1475255586. It was a very good source of inspiration. I found games and activities for each structure to revise and each language skill to practise. The students e.g. loved the shopping game where they created their own shops, laid out their goods, invented dialogues and once in a while the teacher called out which item was prohibited to buy. All students were particular enthusiastic about the snowball game where they threw questions wrapped into white paper at to each other and answered them. They loved it and the amount of practise - and fun - they got was much bigger than in an ordinary class.
Good luck. Heike