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I'm stumbling around the internet trying to find good, 10 or 20 minute games for students of all ages.
I figured that everyone has their favourite game (not necessarily for a specific grammar point; more just a fun thing to get a lesson going or finish it with a bit of fun.) So what is your favourite game?
I use the 'backs to the board' describing game a lot, as well as jeopardy and 'pictionary' type drawing games. Also, the 'Bus game' works well and is great fun......
It's basically a quiz game, so prepare lots of interesting questions. Put the students in 2 teams..... busA and bus B. sit each bus in a single row, like they're on a bus. The questions are asked, but only the 'drivers' (the people at the front of each bus) can answer. If neither team's driver can answer, then the question is offered to everyone else. After each question the driver goes to the back seat of the bus and everyone else moves forward a space (so there is a new driver for each question). It's just a quiz but works well because each student gets a turn in the spotlight and younger students like any activity in which they move around the classroom.
So that's my favourite game, what's yours? I'm running out of ideas and have quite demanding students who have threatened to kill me if i don't keep them entertained.

Hello, Bish,

I'm running out of ideas and have quite demanding students who have threatened to kill me if i don't keep them entertained.

Poor thing. It sounds to me as if your charges are looking more for baby sitting than language development. Don't you feel somewhat abused?:(

Larry Latham

Aw Larry, I thought Bish was speaking rather tongue-in-cheek. It sounded like Bish enjoys the quiz games as much as the students, but was looking for a little variety.

Here's a classic I learned from the book GRAMMAR IN ACTION:

Have your students sit in circles of 9 chairs, with one chair in the middle. One student sits in the middle while the others ask him or her questions for 2 minutes. If he or she doesn't want to answer a question, he or she can just say "PASS". When two minutes are up, another student sits in the middle. When it's all done, you can go around and ask students to tell you one thing they remember someone saying. It works like a charm for me!

Some pointers for using activities:

* Some activities can be re-used, or with a little creativity, changed into new activities.

* Look for ways of extending an activity, so that students have more time to practice and absorb the material.

* Challenge your students to entertain YOU. Have them bring in favorite songs, do presentations, create their own role plays, etc. Let them do the work.

This webpage has numerous links to FREE activities, lessons, handouts, etc.

http://www.geocities.com/allhou/lessgames.htm

Hi Bish,

I've posted a selection of games at the following link

http://www.wordsurfing.co.uk/43682.html

to the Word Surfing site.There are some really good ones - and I hope they help.

By the way, I'm constantly searching for quality games to add to this collection - so if you'd like to sugggest some - please feel free.

Off now to check out Surrealia's suggested links. ( and try what she says -challenge students to entertain you. It will help to motivate your murderous lot in the right direction I'm sure)

Bye + best wishes

Will

http://www.wordsurfing.co.uk

Thanks for the replies. And thanks Lorikeet for clarifying the 'tongue-in-cheek' nature of my final comment.
Some great games everyone, keep them coming. I am surrounded on all sides by blood-hungry children screaming for more.

Great thread.

After months of frantic searching for good games, I discovered that ANY game grabs their interest, at least for a while. The question is: Is a particular game educational as well as entertaining?

The previous foreign teacher at this school used to regularly use a simple 8-by-8 square hunt-for-a-word puzzle. I tried it but the students weren't remembering words I had repeatedly inserted in the puzzles. So, I experimented, making it more demanding memorywise, like, by leaving letters out the words listed, and having the students try to recall and insert the letters; only, half of the kids decided to hunt for the partial words first, and fill in the letters later! (a less challenging, more automatic procedure). So, I wrote hints instead of words and indicated how many letters were in a missing word (e.g. It is very, very big. It has a lot of water. It is blue. There are many fish in it. It is the _ _ _ _ _ .) This game seems like work to me but every single student eagerly does the puzzle. If the game is too difficult, I let students work in teams (peek at neighbour's efforts). The point is to experiment, and find what works with your students. Don't worry about making mistakes. If the students don't like a game, they let you know quickly, and you just change it. Focus on making it educational, because they won't give you much feedback on that, unless you look for it!

My only other success worthy of being advice (besides: Experiment!), and perhaps the secret to making educational/difficult games fun, is: Have prizes for winners. Even if all they win is a high-five or their name on the board next to "First", "Second", "Third" rather than "Fifth", "Sixth", "Seventh".

Koreans are very competitive about keeping up with the Jones (er, Parks), according to Rhie Won-bok. In his book "Korea Unmasked", Koreans are characterized as intense, aggressive, ambitious, greedy, jealous, rivalrous, proud, cliquish, exclusionary. Each of these characteristics can be appealed to in games with teams and prizes. As long as each team feels they have a chance to win and as long as the rules of the game are fair. I have found that Prof. Rhie's insights hold true: Koreans are quick to find injustice in authority figures. If a team is losing, the students would rather see them go down in flames rather than see favourtism make the imbalance in scores less pronounced (I see very little egalatarian attitudes or face-saving BETWEEN teams). I give each student a candy or sticker at the end of class, but the winning team(s) get to choose first, or get a bigger prize, or get two of them. Every class likes this system as long as enough students win. If one or two students win, then others grumble. If half or two-thirds of the class wins, the other half or third doesn't complain, and tries harder next class. I throw in just enough games with random winners, like word bingo games, to keep less successful students interested and hopeful.

I recommend Rhie Won-Bok's book because it helped me see the positive aspects of game-playing behaviour that some Westerners are quick to think indicate negative personality traits simply by the apparent applicability of value-laden concepts like jealousy, greed, and aggressiveness. The book uses cartoons to help you learn about the Korean concepts of 'choong', 'han', 'dure' and 'jeong' (which your students were reared on) and you may understand the history and mentality of competitiveness in Korean life, and why games are not as decadent as some Western teachers have tried to lead me to believe. As long as a game is educational, I will try it.

My ideal is to make EVERYTHING into a game. My students know that the 20-minute lessons are followed by 30-min games directly relating to it. I would love to participate in an idea-sharing workshop in game-making: How to play with language. The students get enough lectures, drills, and tests from their other teachers.

Let's weave this thread into the fabric of our teaching: Experiments in Playing with Language (EPL). Be an EPL teacher!

Just a thought.

My ideal is to make EVERYTHING into a game. ...The students get enough lectures, drills, and tests from their other teachers.

Those poor kids! If all they're getting is games, lectures, drills, and tests, how are they ever going to learn anything useful about English?

Or maybe they're just there for the entertainment.

Larry Latham

Alas Larry, I think you missed her point. She said, "The question is: Is a particular game educational as well as entertaining?" She's doing stealth teaching--hiding the educational objectives behind entertainment. The students don't know what hit them--they are having fun learning a language. If she finds that lectures and drills result in bored students who dislike the language, but if she packages the material in a different way she can have them learn and enjoy themselves, more power to her.

Perhaps I did miss her point, but I don't think so. Don't get me wrong, here, I applaud her desire to make language learning enjoyable for her students. Nothing gets accomplished in a tense, boring, teacher centered, politico-administrative driven atmosphere.

And I can see that Mista van Islander is a creative and intelligent person, and enthusiastic about her job. All to her great credit. But she's going too far. Games are not the only way to have a good time. Mista's students may be young, and if they are very small (say, 6 or 7 or 8 years old) perhaps games might be the way to go. I'll admit I have little experience working with students that young. But if they are older than about 10, they will be able to enjoy exploring the language with her, if she is skillful in her approach. Learning doesn't have to be dull if the teacher has a passion for it that she can pass on to her students. Making EVERYTHING into a game runs the risk of trivializing their study of English, and I don't think that is what she has in mind doing. There may be an unintended outcome for her students, despite their having a fun time in her classroom. Teachers too often, in my view, rationalize their use of games in class by trying to find some "educational value" in them, however minuscule. Nothing is wrong with playing an occasional game for no reason other than that it's fun...period. But their use in a classroom ought to be a very small part of the overall plan.

Larry Latham

Hmm, perhaps the word "game" is also a problem. It sounded like some of what Mista van Islander is doing is encouraging cooperative approaches (working in teams) and using puzzles. Since I don't have the opportunity to visit her classroom, I really don't know what her students' ages are or how she puts together her whole package. Perhaps she will be interested in giving us some further examples to move the discussion along.

This is basically backs to the board, (but don't tell the students... )

You take some new words from the lesson or previous lesson, along with a few others, and write/print them on slips of paper. Then a group of about four students sit in a circle and take turns to pick up a word and try to describe it to the others. Whoever guesses the word gets the word; the student with the most words at the end is the winner. If you have 16 students, you have four groups with four complete sets of word. If you have 40 students, you have 10 groups with 10 sets. If you write them by hand, it doesn't take too long, but obviously with a computer and printer you can copy and paste so it's a breeze. The scissor work is the time-consuming part, but I think it's worth it as it's a good activity, a way to cement recently-learned vocab, to get quiet students speaking, produce creative language, and just have fun.

(I look forward to reading Larry's disapproving comments)

I guess I’m getting the reputation of being disapproving! Ah well, perhaps my age is showing too much. Perhaps it’s just fun playing the contrarian sometimes.

There’s not much to disapprove of with Neil’s game, save, perhaps that in his description it deals with the language one word at a time. Couldn’t the same be done with phrases, or institutional utterances, or sentence heads?

Nor is my problem with the word “game.” I have nothing against games themselves. Some are fun; some of the fun ones can be socially binding—getting people to interact and become friends, which can be truly useful in the classroom. But let’s not fool ourselves into believing too much about the value of games in ‘cementing recently learned vocab’, or any other direct language benefit. Very little is cemented with such an activity, and we all know that from our experiences with students. Cementing occurs with personal reflection, not group fun. Contriving to make everything in the classroom into a game perhaps condemns students to years of studying with little mastery of English to show for it, although they surely will have learned a lot of games, and they may have had a lot of merriment. We all know that too, because we all have students who have been in English classes for years and who haven’t gotten much from it. To the extent that teachers believe their job is to provide students with a good time, games may be appropriate. And I will agree that having a good time in English class is certainly a good idea. But let’s not rationalize ourselves into believing something about games that isn’t true. Games cannot be justified by their “practice value” in the more-or-less mindless repetition of recently learned words, or even phrases. At the very least, the amount of time spent on games in the classroom is not justified by the actual value attained toward mastery of the new language.

What we know so far about language acquisition suggests that what we really need to do in our classrooms is get students to think about English. This means they have to ponder, contemplate, mull over, chew on, reflect deeply, speculate. It's a personal activity. Errors are useful here. Games, while they may be fun, do not generally provide the proper atmosphere for that. Not that there is no place for fun in the process, as long as there is genuine introspection about English. There needs to be a sense of discovery, of progress. Endless repetition is of questionable value. Getting our students to think, at least much of the time, would surely be better. The question is, how do we do that?

Larry Latham

Larry, I don't think anyone in this thread is suggesting that English lessons should simply consist of one game after another. So don't be coy, tell us your favourite game.

My favorite game is football

Actually, I hardly ever use games in class. (Humbug! ) I do, however, like to get students working in groups to solve problems. One I like is the "NASA" project, where students are told that their spaceship has landed on the moon, but due to a computer problem, they have come down in the wrong place. They're going to have to walk to the moon base, which is just over 300 km from where they are. They don't know the direction. They are given a list of 15 items from the spaceship that they can choose from to take with them. They won't be able to carry all of the items, so their first task is to agree on a priority order of the items on the list. Usually I ask them to work in groups of 3 or 5 students. (I've found that odd numbers tend to work better.) After the groups have ordered their lists, we have a whole class discussion to try to resolve the differences in priorities determined by the small groups.

Another I like is: I divide them into small groups, and to each group I give 3 double-page sheets of newspaper (English language, of course), a pair of sissors, some sticky tape. Then I ask them to build the tallest structure they can with the materials they have. Tallest structure that will stand on it's own wins. Works best if you have a multi-language group of students.

If you want to pin me down to a game, I do sometimes, just for fun, use a dictation game wherein I type up an anecdote of about one paragraph and make a couple of copies. I then tape these up to the front of the classroom, and divide the students into teams of two persons. One person is a "writer" and the other is a "runner." The writers sit at desks at the back of the room. Their runners run up to the front, peer at the anecdote typed on the page and memorize as much of it as they can, then run back to dictate to the writer. Runners may not write, but they may spell for the writers. About half-way through, writers and runners switch places. First team done correctly wins. Even adult students giggle and laugh like first graders. It's a noisy game.

None of this changes my views on games!! Nor do I do these kinds of things in every class. I rather be working with them on a text to explore the language found therein. Much can be discovered there if you're willing to get into detail.

Larry Latham