Camilo P. answered • 07/05/19
Friendly, Experienced Writing and English Teacher
Some old classics that have always worked well for me ...
1) Divide the class into teams. Each sends one member up to the board with a piece of chalk. You give them 30 seconds (or a minute) to write down as many words as they can think of starting with a certain letter. Afterwards, you go through and strike out any that are misspelled, adding up the rest of them. The team with the most collective points at the end wins.
2) Pictionary. Again, the class is divided into teams. You bring one student out into the hall with you and give them something to draw on the board, which their classmates have to guess. This one always gets loud, with everyone shouting out random things. Even a simple word like "horse" can be surprisingly hard to draw in 30 frantic seconds.
3) Telephone. Divide class into teams. You whisper a phrase to the first student in each team (or give it to them written down on a sheet of paper), and they have to pass the message on to the next student ... and so on, until the end. Each student only gets once chance to whisper their message, so there will probably be some things lost in translation as you make your way down the line. The last student has to write the (usually garbled) message down on a sheet of paper and present it to the class.
4) Musical Fill-in-the-Blanks. Prepare a worksheet with some of the words to a song blanked out. Then, play the music for the class, and have them try to catch the missing ones. Beatles songs work really well for this, because Paul and co. seem to enunciate clearly most of the time. (Besides, who doesn't like the Beatles??)
