What is a fun game to review vocabulary for beginning ESL students?
Posted by gitterdun in TeachingNov 30th, 2009 | 7 responsesfiregash asked:
It must be a fun and engaging game that can be played for 10-20 minutes, because it’s a review game for the vocabulary we learned for the entire week.
ESL = English as Second Language
I am teaching overseas.
7 Responses to “What is a fun game to review vocabulary for beginning ESL students?”
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Who has… I have
Make up index cards that give clues.
Who has the word that means the same thing as “seat”?
Someone will have the card that reads “chair” and then continues to read the bottom of the card with the next question which will lead to another student.
Something like Scattergories would probably work, and you could improvise, make your own version of it instead of buying it in the store. Just in case you aren’t familiar with it, its a game where you roll a dice with letters on it and see who can come up with the most words under a category that start with whatever letter is rolled. So if someone rolls the letter “T” and the category is “Animals”, I could say turkey, tamarin, tortoise, or toad.
whats esl mean?
“flyswatter” either draw pictures or write words (or have students do it or print them) randomly all different directions on a large paper, board, overhead, etc. Have one individual from each team (2 teams) come up – you say the word and the first person to hit the picture with the flyswatter gets the point. (variations- 2 long lines and first 2 compete – correct goes to end of line and incorrect sits down – last one standing wins a prize OR instead of team play with large pictures, print on small papers and play in small groups of 3 – 1 person calls word and other 2 compete, then switch)
“baseball” – divide into 2 teams – either draw baseball field on the board or designate bases around the room. 1st team sends someone up to “bat” – they can either choose single, double, triple or homerun depending on difficulty of the question, or if all same difficulty then have single, double, triple or homerun in an envelope to randomly draw. If they are correct, they advance and next person on team bats. If you are in a hurry, have only 1 out (wrong answer) and then switch teams.
This can be modified for basketball and football depending on the interests and seasons.
Other fun games:
memory/matching, pictionary, hangman, charades, bingo
Are you teaching a “definition” too? If so, write each word on a separate index card and each definition on a separate card. Pass them out, then the kids to could “walk around” and find their partner/match. If you don’t use definitions, you could find a representative picture (or even have the kids draw one as part of the introduction to the new words part of the lesson), then they could match the words to the pictures. I say representative pictures because words that are verbs are often harder to find pictures for than nouns. Some explanation may be required of how the picture relates to the word. It’s all about context anyway, but I digress . . .
Just repeat the activity a couple of times, taking up the cards, mixing them up, and repassing them out.
Or you could make up a bingo game, if you use a lot of words, or when you have lots of words in categories that you are trying to include. Just be sure to have prizes, even if it is just a sticker – you are playing a game, right!
Have them find the words in a newspaper or publication that is geared to their interest area with an appropriate reading level and give points for those than can decipher the words use in the sentence and article:
1 point for finding the word
2 points for reading the sentence correctly in which the the word is found
5 points for correctly summarizing the context of the sentence.
10 points for correctly summarizing the article.
I taught in Korea and they loved Hangman.