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ESL Killer is a simple game that requires no preparation and no materials. That’s why it’s such a great game to go to when you suddenly find yourself with an extra 10 minutes on your hands.
Explain to students that there is a killer loose in the classroom, but no one knows who it is. Read More...
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This isn’t so much an activity or game as it’s a great way to kill time at the end of class or before your break.
I often use Google Translate in class to tell my students what a difficult word is in Chinese. I find this is a lot easier than explaining the word, which could just present a lot more confusing words to the students. I found out that many of the words, and especially the sentences, just didn’t make sense. Oftentimes they were quite funny in their unintended meanings. I figured, why not just write some silly sentences into Google Translate, and let the kids get a good laugh? Well, it worked. After several months I had a whole file of great little stories that made little sense, but which made the students laugh quite a bit. Here’s an example: She ate a turtle and a fish and a dog and a tiger and a mouse and a chicken and a cake and a school book, and a pig, and a pig, and a pig, and a flower and she got really sick. She went to the hospital and they asked her what she ate, and she said she had eaten a turtle and a fish and a dog and a tiger and a mouse and a chicken and a cake and a school book, and a pig, and a pig, and a pig, and a flower. The doctor looked at her and said “that’s all?” It might sound stupid, but so are a lot of the things you find yourself doing in an ESL class. Give it a try regardless; it just might become one of your go-to activities at the end of class. My first year of teaching in China was tough. I didn’t know what I was doing for the first 6 months, and by then I was already halfway through my contract. Each day in class was a struggle, and how could it not be when I had 50 students, most of whom didn’t want to do anything but misbehave. I relied on PowerPoints heavily, and would usually go through each class with the same one, hoping it could get me through the 50 minute class. They sometimes came close, but I invariably had 15 to 20 minutes left to kill. It quickly became apparent that PowerPoints alone weren’t going to cut it. One PowerPoint that I got a lot of traction out of was called Doctors. It showed lots of great pictures of broken arms, people getting sick, and everything else we associate with a visit to the hospital. But what made it really good was that the last few slides outlined a dialogue between two students. That dialogue worked really well, and made this one of my more memorable lessons. How it Works
At least that’s how I always modeled my doctor dialogues, and they nearly always ended with the doctor asking for $500, whether he offered a viable cure or not. Students loved it, and I knew I had a real winner on my hands when they got into their characters and came up with some great role-playing. This activity works well for classes with parents watching, as the students will have fun with it if you encourage them. It can be adapted for all levels, although kindergarten-aged kids, not so much. I came up with this idea one summer when I had four 3-hour long classes each week and students that just didn’t want to be there for even 5 minutes. I soon realized that I’d have to ditch all of the lesson plan rubbish that my training center gave me, or at least scale it back to an hour or less. So what was I going to do with those other 2 hours?
While I was living in China, my mom always sent me magazines. I would bring in the old issues to work, using them for arts & crafts projects. One day I started to cut out pictures of people. Read More... One of the best games I ever came up with while teaching English in China is called 5-in-1. The game is so incredibly simple that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it during my first three years of teaching; it really would have saved me a lot of heartache, and the students a lot of boredom. How It WorksClick herBefore class you need to do a little bit of work. Look at the students’ books to find out what vocabulary words they’re using. You can also throw in a lot of random words. The thing is, you need to come up with 5 words for each small piece of paper. Each piece of paper will be one game card. I usually use the following template when writing a new game card:
So you’re first game card might look something like this:
I’ll usually make 15 to 20 game cards for each class that I want to play the game with. Usually I’ll have several left over, as I do the game toward the end of class.  Game Play
That’s why it’s called 5-in-1. What’s great about it is that students really pick up on continuous tense if you include –ing words. They figured out they can say “now” to get their team to guess. All of my students get excited by this game, and even the most shy will volunteer. I encourage students to skip a word if they don’t know it, and I don’t help them at all. It’s a great way to sit back and let the students do all the work. The game works great if you pull up http://www.online-stopwatch.com/ on the classroom computer. It’s even better if you can put that up on the large monitor, if your classroom has one. Students get excited by the ‘race-against-the-clock’ aspect of the game, and there are a lot of laughs at some of the things that are said when trying to make their team guess. A few months ago I wrote about one of the great ESL activities I came up with after a particularly boring class where I had little to do. I called the activity Personification Pictures, and it went over alright. Since then I’ve done it with several upper-level ESL classes and ESL students, and they’ve found it rather enjoyable, a nice break from their usual drudgery. The concept is simple: students are given a handout with anywhere from 5 to 10 pictures on it. Read More...   I love using dice in the ESL classroom, and my students love it too. There’s nothing worse than doing the same old boring grammar, pronunciation, and sentence-building activities and exercises over and over again with little if no variation.
That’s why the last time I came back from the US to China I had a small bag of dice in my suitcase. Now, you can get a lot of 6-sided dice with no problem in China; people gamble on all the beer and whore streets with them all the time. But you may have some troubles getting dice that have more sides, like 10-sided and my favorite, 20-sided dice. Read More... Do you feel as though you just can’t go on any longer? Are those bad thoughts starting to creep in again? Have you begun to lose all hope? If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, than it could mean that you’ve been playing the ESL game of Hangman for too long. This children’s favorite has been around for ages, but it’s rather staid and even a bit hokey. While your younger ESL students still might get a kick out of it, your older ESL students are sure to grumble and complain each and every time you draw those gallows on the board. So what’s a new, or even experienced, ESL teacher to do? Why, come up with the same thing, just with a few slight variations. Over my years of teaching ESL games, I’ve had to change a lot of existing games to make them a bit more interesting and fun. Even a few tweaks to the format or how the game looks can go a long way, even when the rules and fundamental play are still the same. Here are a few of my favorites: 
 There are a lot of things you can do with colors in the ESL classroom, and they don’t all have to involve young learners. While teaching colors is rather a silly idea most of the time with higher levels, there are still many great games and combination activities you can come up with to have your students looking at colors in a new way, and having fun doing it. A simple game that I now use a few times a week is called “What’s That Color?” What’s That Color is a great ESL colors game that I came up with about a week ago when I went into my last class of the weekend. It was a class of students that fall in the mid-level range for English abilities, and they’re a bit older, I’d say 11 to 13. I always wonder how students who are that old can have such lower-level English abilities, especially considering that they’ve been teaching English in public schools for some time in China. Anyways, what I did was put up all of the colors on the board, about 8 to 10. I joked with the students, chose one, and said, “Alright, how do you spell green?” The students weren’t quite sure if I was serious, and then after a good smile, I told them what we’d do. How It WorksDraw anywhere from 6 to 10 color blocks on the board. You can either use a ball and have a student throw at a color, or you can use dice and select the color that way. Either way, the student will have to say how many things that are that particular color. So if you get green you could say “trees, grass, book, a ball.” The way I did it in class was I had each student go individually. They had to stand up and say how many they could think of, and their team would get that many points. I divided the class up into girls and boys to make this easier. Students got about 4 to 5 answers each time.  I tried it another evening with a much higher-level class, and this time we rolled dice instead of throwing a ball. I let these students write down as many words as they could in 30 seconds. I again had the class divided into girls and boys, and I let them compare notes when the time was up so that they could come up with a final number. These students were getting anywhere from 10 to 20 answers each round. Both classes liked the game and we got a lot of good laughs out of it.
An important thing to consider is how you want to count answers. I told the students that they could only have one ‘clothes.’ If you don’t do this you’ll get answers like “blue dress, blue shoes, blue pants, blue shirt, blue t-shirt.” I just don’t think that’s fair. Another thing is food. You might want to limit that to 1 to 2 answers, although if something particularly creative comes up, I’d count it. Few students know what an eggplant is, but they do know the “purple vegetable.” Many times you’ll be teaching an ESL class and you’ll get one or more new students added in. Sometimes you’ll have to start a brand new class and none of the students will know one another, and none of them will know you. That’s why you need to make the students feel comfortable, give them an environment that encourages them to speak, and also one that is fun.
Many students are quite shy, especially about their English language abilities. It’s therefore imperative that you make them feel good. Encourage a bit of silliness, and don’t be afraid if students are speaking their own language a little, or even a lot. If they’re talking, it’s good. Here are three easy ways you can do this.
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Greg Strandberg
From 2008 to 2013 I was an ESL teacher in Shenzhen, China. I've worked in public schools, training centers, and one-on-one as a tutor. Categories
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February 2016
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