This is never good when you’re a teacher, so you’ve got to think of some fun and exciting ways to get them doing grammar. That’s why I came up with quite a few different grammar dice activities. All you’ll need for this is one 6-sided dice and whatever grammar notes you’re teaching.
Exercise One
Let’s say you’re teaching continuous tense. I’ll explain to the students that this is what you’re doing “now.” After that I’ll elicit some verbs, or use some from the book:
1. Run
2. Play
3. Fight
4. Kiss
5. Jump
6. Poop
After that I’ll choose one student to go first (good luck getting volunteers, it’s like pulling teeth most of the time) and they’ll roll the dice.
Let’s say they get #3. They’ll have to make a sentence like: “He is fighting the dog,” or “The dog is fighting him now.”
Pretty easy, and they have to change the verb to continuous with –ing themselves.
Exercise Two
What if you’ve got some really low level learners or young children? Well, just do the same thing but with a noun. Let’s take animals:
1. Bird
2. Cat
3. Dog
4. Turtle
5. Horse
6. Elephant
Roll the dice and get them to give you a simple sentence, like “I like bird,” or “The dog is black.” They’ll almost never put an ‘s’ on the end, but hey, at least they’re talking!
Exercise 3
Those last two were pretty simple Let’s try something a bit more difficult, and maybe fun.
1. Today
2. Yesterday
3. Tomorrow
4. Last Week
5. In 10 Years
6. 100 Years Ago
In this example students will have to use ‘will’ for future tenses, and –ed for past tenses. It requires them to be aware of how tenses change depending on what time reference you’re talking about. This is a good one for higher levels, and it forces them to be a bit more creative.
Hopefully those games will give you something to try the next time you have a boring grammar point to discuss in class. Like many of the activities I talk about on this site, I don’t do this one much anymore, I did it for about 2 years, and I got bored of it. Still, every once in a while I’ll pull it out, and it’s a pretty good time.