Interesting classroom activities

[Dqueen]

Hello everyone,

I am supposed to make a presentation to my colleagues on interesting classroom activities. I am in urgent need of some ideas. My main activity is using madlibs, but I need more. By the way, I live in Turkey and teach English as a second language. I teach primary school kids but the ideas can also be applicable to middle school students. I want to introduce different games or activities other teachers can play with their students when they teach grammar and the four skills. It would be very nice if these activities are not much heard of. Thanks already.

[patsensei]

Have you ever tried "running dictation"? what you do is you make about 8 sentences and you cut them up and tape them up around the room. then you make the class into pairs. So one student runs and looks at the sentence taped up around the room and tells the other student who writes down the sentence.
It's a good activity because it uses both writing, reading listening and speaking. Hope that helps.
:D

http://www.teachjapanforum.com

[ForumAngel]

Here's a really fun review activity that the kids love. This exact example was given to me by one of my customers who is using and adapting my games:

Have your pupils start about 4 feet from their "a/an" worksheet. Have three rows with 16 words in each row. On the desk where the children start they have a piece of lined paper. Have pencils at both ends so that they aren't running with them. The words in the list should be words you have already introduced and had some speaking practise with.

On "Go" the pupils run from their desk to the worksheet and write the appropriate "a" or "an" in front of the word. They then run back to their respective desks and write it out in full. For example if they put down "an" in front of egg, then they run back and write, "an egg". The fastest person with the highest accuracy is the winner.
Of course you can play down the competitive element, and with 4-5 year olds make sure that everyone wins. Competition is a whole different subject anyway.

This idea can be adapted to all sorts of writing ideas – spelling, fill in the blanks, verb endings…anything as long as it does not involve writing out long sentences.

While the idea is best for beginners to lower intermediates, you could probably use it now and again with an advanced class just to drill in a particular target structure, or to work with some words which you notice are frequently wrong.

Kind regards,
Shelley
Receive free games and ideas to make teaching children more fun on: http://www.teachingenglishgames.com

[jonnielsen]

I have just remembered some activities we used to do at the American Language School. When one of the students says a word, the one next to him/her must say another word that starts with the final letter of the word said by his/her classmate. It was a real fun! It also helped us with spelling. We were not allowed to write the words. We had to imagine the spelling in next to no time. The teacher used to give us tongue twisters and asked us to practice them to improve our pronunciation, too. He also used to give us some letters and asked us to form as much words as possible using them. The reason behind this activity was to teach us that using a method always helps. Because we did not follow any method and we were doing it at random. I hope these activities will help you.

[philip]

Classrooms are the basic creation of every students and their whole life. So in the academic life the students can make more funs and hobbies to reduce the academic stress. There have a lot of class room activities. The Favorite Hobbies among Students includes Writing,photographing,stampcollection,reading etc. Writing and reading is the important hobbies that will get the best creativity and it helps to improve the thinking ability of a student.

[OscarEF]

An interesting class activity I do with my Students, it is that I give them a topic and they have to think as many words they can that are related to the topic while they pass by a ball or dot, then when they are finished saying all the sentences or words that were related to the topic I place a song (Coldplay, Twenty-One Pilots or Imagine Dragon) and let them write a small response or comment of how to the topics can be related to each other. it takes around 10 minutes to play it. it follows the writing process, the students learned vocabulary and it helps them to think.
Oscar Eduardo Fajardo

[Talitsa]

My kids' favourite is called Ping-Pong. It's a kind of Hangman, which is played by 2 teams. One of them guesses the word by letters as usual, and the other tries to find which letters are out of this word. The hidden word has to be long enough, because the first team wins in case of its guessing and the second wins in case of saying the same number of letters. It's from here: http://ideas4el.com/Games/ There are lots of other interesting games on this website.

[Reon76]

I tried to integrate English classes in a foosball game and it happened to be really successful. I taught Chinese students a couple of years ago, and young children really loved table football game, so one of them told the rules of the game in English while others were playing, the other one told some rules of usual football, the third one shared his thoughts about what he liked more football of foosball, and the other one could comment a game using Present Cont. It was really cool and I mixed students so they always liked the idea of playing or speaking.

[LarryStay]

I tried to integrate English classes in a foosball game and it happened to be really successful. I taught Chinese students a couple of years ago, and young children really loved table football game, so one of them told the rules of the game in English while others were playing, the other one told some rules of usual football, the third one shared his thoughts about what he liked more football of foosball, and the other one could comment a game using Present Cont. It was really cool and I mixed students so they always liked the idea of playing or speaking.

Hi! It sounds interesting. Do your students need to prepare or they just need to talk right on the spot without any preparations?

[Reon76]

Of course, I give them some information about football to review (from our classes) and also new information to know and to practice new words in speech. They need to read some articles beforehand https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/sports-football.htm, https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/vocabulary/football.shtml, https://recroompick.com/foosball-rules/. So the purpose is to learn new vocabulary, to practice it in speech, and to create a natural atmosphere so it will be easy for them to talk in real life.

[rosabombin]

I strongly feel that teachers should use games in the classroom for introducing new knowledge or developing new content. It’s a pretty good guess that your students like to play games. Games are great way to develop cooperative learning strategies among students.

It’s possible that some teachers think this is a waste of time, but, to be honest, during my years as a teacher I’ve observed that learning with games is a good way to consolidate the new concepts that the pupils are learning; also, they have fun while they are learning. When I started to study English, it surprised me how unusual it was to use games in order to improve our English. However, in my opinion, students should ask for fun ways to learn a language.

To sum up:
• Games help students to fix new ideas, new definitions, new vocabulary, new structures or new grammar, it depends on the subject.
• Students need to enjoy themselves while they are learning.
• Using games in the classroom built a collaborative atmosphere between students.
I definitely think that teachers should reconsider the way they are teaching and move towards more enjoyable methods like using games in their lessons, even in a traditional context.

[GriffyHEE]

When I play games with my students, I love making activities based around spinners.

I usually have two spinners and I will set the text on the spinners to relate to what we are teaching. For example, if I am practicing comparatives with my students, I will ask my students for different animals and write them on the spinners. Then, we spin the spinners and in groups they should compare the two animals that the spinners land on.

"Elephants are bigger than crocodiles."
"Butterflies are more colorful than zebras."

Students love to practice this sort of content with spinners. If you have an interactive whiteboard in your classroom I have a spinner you can download on my website here on the tools section: https://www.happyeverydayenglish.com/tools

There are plenty of other tools and games that you might be interested there. Good luck!

[ARiddy]

Check out ESL Escape Room!

It´s a review game that covers a huge range of vocabulary and grammar!

https://eslescaperoom.com/

[leon99]

Challenge students with English tongue twisters. Start with simple ones and gradually move to more challenging ones. This activity helps improve pronunciation and fluency.