Pass the ball

This game practises adjectives. You need a ball, or a screwed up piece of paper will work fine.
Procedure
Students and you stand or sit in a circle.
Pass the ball to the person next to you in the circle and pretend the ball is really heavy by miming.
Tell the person next to you that it's really, really heavy and give it to them.
They continue passing the ball around the circle making out it's heavy.
Tell students to think of a new adjective each. The ball is going to take on different characteristics
as it goes around the circle.
When you say the ball is changing' the student who has the ball must pass it to the next student
using their adjective instead, and so it goes on until everyone has had a chance to change the ball's
form.
It could be hot, cold, light, alive, smelly etc! At the end ask students the adjectives they remember
and get them to mime them for the others to guess.

Running Dictation
This is a lively activity that practises speaking, listening, writing, walking and remembering!
Procedure
Choose a short passage or dialogue and make several copies. Put the copies up around the walls of
the classroom (or even the school building).
Put the students in pairs or small groups. The aim is for one of the students in each pair to walk (or
run!) to read the passage on the wall. They remember some of the passage and walk (or run!) back
to their partner. They quietly dictate what they remembered to their partner, who writes it down.
They then swap roles. Over several turns they will build the whole passage. This means they
really do have to run back and forth because students will only remember three or four words at a
time.
The winning pair is the team that finishes first - although you need to check for mistakes. If there
are mistakes, they must keep walking to check!
A good idea is to teach them punctuation vocabulary beforehand if you want them to use the
correct punctuation in English. It's a good way to check spelling and fabulous for pronunciation -
and great memory training!

Conditional chain game

This game is good to revise and practise structures in the first conditional.
o The teacher begins with a sentence, for example "If I go out tonight, I'll go to the cinema."
o The next person in the circle must use the end of the previous sentence to begin their own
sentence. E.g. "If I go to the cinema, I'll watch The Last Samurai" The next person could say, "If I
watch The Last Samurai, I'll see Tom Cruise" etc. etc.

Word Associations
A very simple game where students must think of words connected to the word that comes before.
For example, the teacher says, "Fish", the next person thinks of a word they associate with fish,
such as "water", the next person could say "a glass" the next, "window" etc.
You can decide as a group if associations are valid. Ask the student to justify the connection.
To make it more competitive, set a thinking time limit and eliminate students.
When they are eliminated they can become judges.

Chinese whispers - telephone lines

A sentence is whispered around the circle. The last student to receive the message either says it aloud or
writes it on the board. This can be a fun way to introduce a topic and activate schema at the beginning of
a class. For example, for a class on food, whisper the question, "What did you have for lunch today?"
Equally, at the end of a class it can be a nice way to revise structures or vocabulary from the lesson.
Concentration
To begin with, students sit in a circle and do the hand actions of lap (both hands to lap), clap, left
click, right click.
When they get the hang of it, add these words in time to the rhythm "Concentration,
concentration, concentration now beginning, are you ready? If so, let's go!"
On the first finger click, you say your name, and on the second click you say the name of someone
in the circle.
You have passed the turn to the person you nominated on your second finger click.
Then they say their own name on the first click and the name of another student on the second.
When they have got the idea, use lexical sets. For example, everyone says their favourite sport
first then use these to play the game.
For a competitive group, eliminate those students who make mistakes.

I went to the shops and I bought

The classic memory game where each person adds a new item to the list in alphabetical order.
For example, student 1, "I went to the shops and I bought an apple". Student 2, "I went to the
shops and I bought an apple and a bike". Student 3, "I went to the shops and I bought an apple, a
bike and a coat".
This game can be adapted to different levels and lexical sets. I recently revised sports and the use
of do/ play/ go by playing "I went to the sports centre", the same game but using different
vocabulary. For example, student 1 "I went to the sports centre and I did aerobics", "I went to the
sports centre and I did aerobics and played basketball", "I went to the sports centre and I did
aerobics, played basketball and went canoeing" etc.

Yes / No game
Nominate one student to be in the hot seat, slightly apart from the rest of the circle.
The rest of the group must think of questions to ask the student in the hot seat.
They can ask anything they like, the only rule is that the student in the hot seat must answer the
questions without using the words "yes" or "no".
Also ban "yeah", head nods and shakes! For example, a student asks, "Are you wearing jeans
today?" The student in the hot seat could reply, "I am" or "you can see that they're jeans!"

'The Washing Line' - teaching clothes vocabulary

This is a good vocabulary activity to use with younger learners.

To teach the names of clothes, I have my students cut a page of a newspaper in the shape of a hat, gloves,
trousers, etc. Then, using a washing line and clothes pegs, I ask my students to hang their projects on the
washing line. My students repeat the names of the clothes after me. After teaching the vocabulary of
clothes, I ask them to close their eyes while I hide some of the clothes. A few seconds later I ask them to
open their eyes and name the missing clothes and then to find them.