Category — 1. Beginning Students

Use this game in your ESL classroom to test vocabulary comprehension & reading ability.

Skill Level: Beginning and Intermediate students.

Materials: Chalk board.

Instructions:
Make a list of the day’s vocabulary on the board and choose one student (or use your TA, if you have one) to be the Official Word Picker. Students line up and come forward one at a time. The Official Word Picker points to a vocab word and the student asks, “Mother, may I _______?” If you say, “Yes, you may” the student must correctly act out whatever the vocab word is.
The game can be made into a competition by seeing which students can read read & act out vocab without making any mistakes.

Practice numbers, asking the time, and telling time (and give your kids a chance to burn off some energy) with this fun game for the whole class.

Skill Level: Beginning students.

Materials: A large, open space.

Instructions:
Prep: Begin the game by reviewing the hours of the day. Ask the class what time they usually eat dinner. Take a common dinner time and write it on the blackboard.
Game: Students line up against one wall of the classroom and the teacher (in the role of the Wolf) stands against the other with her back to the students.
All together the students ask, “Wolf, wolf, what time is it?” The Wolf responds with an hour (”It’s four o’clock!”) and the students take that many steps towards the wolf, counting each step out loud. If the Wolf says either “It’s dinner time!” or whatever time the class said that they eat dinner (e.g. “It’s six o’clock!”), the Wolf then chases the students back to the wall where they started the game. Any students who are caught are eaten by the Wolf for dinner. (”Yum! Yum! Yum!”)
The winner of the game is the be the first student to touch the Wolf, at which point the game resets and the winning student gets to be the Wolf.
Note: Do what you can to keep the kids from touching each other while running back to the wall–if there’s shoving the game can get dangerous!

A great game to work on phonemic awareness with your younger students while reviewing vocabulary and student names.

Skill Level: Beginning students.

Materials: None.

Instructions:
Students sit in a circle with the teacher. The teacher uses whatever vocabulary has been reviewed in class to describe a student using the following script:
“I’m thinking of a student who is (wearing red/tall/has black hair) and whose name is…”
Rather than saying the student’s name the teacher claps the syllables of the name.
Students guess which student was described by the teacher.

A fun drawing game that rewards students’ ability to answer questions correctly by letting them draw the missing body parts on their team’s Buddy.

Skill Level:
Beginning, Intermediate.

Materials:
Die, blackboard.

Instructions:
Similar in pace and game design to Master Builder. Students roll a die to see what body part they get to add to an incomplete person drawn on the board.
Divide the class into teams and for each team draw a blank face and limbless torso on the board. (To give the students more chances to draw I usually draw more than one Buddy for each team.)
Tell the students that today they will have the opportunity to make a Buddy to keep them company for the rest of class. [Read more →]