7 hour bus ride

[genevieve]

My school is planning a summer camp and they've asked me to come up with ESL activities for our 7 hour bus ride (both ways). Does anyone have any ideas for fun games or activites that we can do on the road?

[genevieve]

I guess there's always 99 bottles of beer on the wall.

[Sally Olsen]

You can play the alphabet game - finding the alphabet on signs or car license plates in order. This can be ongoing for the seven hours because some letters are hard to find. (You might want to post Q and Z in strategic places for the ride home and just skip them on the way up). You can play car Bingo with different makes and different colours of cars on premade cards. You can sing or teach them songs along the way, play music and then have the words in small music books. On the way home they can make a journal of their experiences in small notebooks with writing and drawings - have lots of fancy coloured pens and stars, stickers so they can make it fun. You can tell them stories about the areas you pass - tourist guide style - get an English tour book. You can spend 15 minutes every hour or so doing seat exercises like they recommend on the airplanes. Turn you ankle ten times, turn your wrists ten times and so on. You can get a soft ball to throw around the bus and whoever catches it has to say the name of something that you are passing or make a sentence if they are that good at English. You can play the Nursery Rhyme game with teams - they have to keep chanting nursery rhymes or raps or poems until one team is left. If they don't know many, you can provide cheat sheets for the first few rounds. Have 4 in a team - the first row turns around to chant with the next row, the 3 row with the 4th and so on. You can have a scavenger hunt with things listed on a paper that they might see and they yell them out and check them off. You can vary the lists so only a few will win in the end. You can play add to the drawing. You fold the paper in four accordian style. The first person draws a head and passes it down the line to the next person who can't see the head but just the neck extended on to his/her piece. She then draws the upper torso and extends the lines on the next piece and then the lower torso and finally the legs. The next person names the creature and the next person can start a story about them and so on. You can play Eye Spy in small groups. You can do handclapping games. You can count how many "posts" or banks or whatever in a 20 minute period.

[mesmark]

Wow!

Sally Olsen rocks!

[genevieve]

Sally Olsen,
Thanks for the fantastic ideas!!