5 Fast and Easy Teaching Activity Ideas!
Ready to come Teach in China, but a bit worried about how to make the lesson fun and engaging? We have compiled a few ESL games that can be used for young learners and even adults! They are very easy to prepare for and very engaging.
Back to the Board
What will you need: Flash Cards (digital or paper) and a chair
Objective: To practice newly learned vocabulary
Instruction:
After drilling newly learned vocabulary, have one student come to the front of the class and sit down on the chair with his/her back to the board. The teacher will show the other students the flash card, the other students will mime the word. The student sitting on the chair needs to guess the word.
Whisper Game
What will you need: Nothing
Objective: To practice proactive listening skills with newly learn vocabulary.
Instruction:
Divide the classroom into two teams. Generally works well for a big class of 10-14 students. After dividing the class into two teams, each team will take turns lining up. The teacher will write a sentence on a scrap paper and show it to the first student in line. The student will whisper into the next student’s ear, and the next student will whisper the sentence to the next student until the last student in line gets the sentence. The last student will say the sentence and teacher will award the team a point for answering correctly.
A more fun way to play this in order to prevent the students from saying the sentence too loud is, the other team sitting down can try to listen and steal the sentence phrase during the whispering activity. If the other team correctly guesses the sentence, then award the other team a point.
Flip Cups
What will you need: Paper cups and flashcards
Objective: To encourage student participation in learning vocabulary by playing a fun game of stacking flashcards with paper cups.
Instruction:
After running a class with vocabulary words, you will need to make sure each student is learning and absorbing the new words. Show each student a flash card. If the student says the correct answer, let them put a flash card in a cup. The next student to go will put a cup on the flash card, and put the next flash card over the cup. It will be very fun trying to see how high you can stack the flashcards.
Popcorn Reader
What you will need: Just a reading passage
Objective: To encourage students to focus during reading time.
Instruction:
Reading can be a very tedious task, but very important for language development. It also doesn’t help when there are always a few students who never focus during the reading activity. This Popcorn reader game will solve that problem and put some fun into a reading activity. The teacher will choose a student at random to read a reading passage. The student has the option of reading 1 word, or 3 sentences if he wishes. Then at any point, even during mid-sentence, he calls another student’s name. The next student will continue.
Now during this game, if the students tend to pick on the same students, the teacher can be in charge of calling random students name at any given point in time to change the reader.
ABC Hopscotch
What will you need: Letter Flash Cards
Objective: To help young learners phonics and spelling skills.
Instruction:
Lay out some letter flashcards on the floor in several rows. The number of rows will depend on the length of the word. For example, if you want to practice CVC words(C-A-T, B-A-T, F-A-T, etc) you will need three rows. The teacher will say a CVC word and the student will hop over the letters to spell the word. Reward the student for answering correctly.
** For beginning ESL teachers, a CVC word is a 3 letter word that consists of a Consonant, a Vowel, and a Consonant.
If you have any other fun and exciting teaching activities that you would like to share please comment below!
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Cheers!