Category — 2. Intermediate Students

Have your ESL students practice their writing, spelling, and problem solving skills by playing Battleship!

Skill Level: Intermediate, Advanced

Materials: Battleship playing board (available to download here). The Battleship board I’ve created has a small grid (better for intermediate classes) and a large grid (better for advanced classes).

Instructions: Rules for Battleship can be found here.
In ESL Battleship students hide words rather than ships on their grid, and working in pairs they try to be the first to find and sink all of their partner’s words. If a student thinks she knows her partner’s word rather than guessing coordinates she may guess the entire word (”Is the word at C5 ‘apple’?”), sinking it if it is guessed correctly.
My experience has been that it’s important to give the game a “theme”–types of things (fruit, vehicles, feelings), parts of speech, word beginning with a certain letter, and so on. Also, depending on the skill level of your students it can be a good idea to make some rules about what words they can use–require the words to have at least (or no more than) x letters or require students to use different letters of the alphabet to start words.
Sample requirements for an advanced class could be: Write six words, one three letters long, two four letters long, two five letters long, and one six letters long. Use each of the following letters once as the first letters of your words: A, C, N, E, D, G.

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.

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 →]

Reward your students for answering questions by letting them play a fast-paced house building game!

Skill Level:
Beginning, Intermediate

Materials Needed:
Die, blackboard.

Instructions:
Divide class into teams and draw an example five-sided house on the board: