15-top fun activities and games for teaching english

8/10/2019 15-Top Fun Activities and Games for Teaching English

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Mohsen Mohsen li Mosaeid


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15 fun activities for Present

Simple/Present Continuous

The best way of teaching the present tenses is to compare and contrastthem. These ideas will show you how to do the even more difficult task of

combining them in practice activities, all of them done in simple andentertaining ways.

Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net

There are many well-known and fun activities for the Present Continuous,

such as ones involving miming and ones using pictures of crowded street

scenes. There are also quite a few things you can find in photocopiable

activity books for the Present Simple, such as timetables where studentshave to fill the gaps in by asking each other questions. However, by far the

easiest and clearest way of showing the meanings and uses of the Present

Simple and Present Continuous tenses is to contrast them. Perhaps the main

reason why this approach isnt used more in the classroom is that it can be

difficult to find speaking and writing activities with a natural mix of the twotenses. These activities aim to do away with that lack once and for all!

1. Mimes plus

Give students a list of Present Continuous sentences that they can mime to

their partners for them to guess, e.g. You are eating bread and jam. You

can add the Present Simple to this by choosing actions that some people doevery day (e.g. You are eating spicy food and You are blowing your

nose) and asking them to go on to discuss how often they do those things

and why. This is more interesting if it is a topic that is linked to cultural

differences, e.g. table manners.

2. Mimes plus Two

Another way of combining Present Continuous mimes with the PresentSimple is to ask students to mime actions that they do in their real lives

(perhaps choosing from a list with sentences like You are taking a

shower). The people watching the mimes have to make a Present

Continuous sentence to describe the action and also make a true Present

Simple sentence about the person miming and that action (e.g. You take a

shower every morning or You sometimes take a shower but you usually

take a bath).


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3. Definitions game

Give students a list of words and ask them to choose one and describe it

with just sentences using the Present Simple and Preset Continuous. For

example, if the word is breathe they could say I do this many many

times every day and Everyone in the world is doing this now except somedivers.

4. 20 questions

With the same list of words as in Definitions Game above, students ask

each other Present Simple and Present Continuous Yes/No questions until

they guess which of the words their partner chose. Possible questions

include Are you doing this now?, Is anyone in this class doing this

now?, Are many people in this city doing this now?, Do you do this

every day? and Do you do this more than twice a week?

5. Postcards

Ask students to imagine that they are writing a postcard while they are

sitting on the balcony of their hotel room, on the beach or outside a caf.

They should naturally use the Present Continuous to describe what is

happening at the moment they are writing (e.g. The sun is shining orThe children are playing beach volleyball) and the Present Simple for

their daily routine while on holiday (e.g. I spend most of the day next tothe swimming pool or I have breakfast in the same caf every morning),

but you could also specifically ask them to stick to those tenses.

Alternatively, you could give them sentence stems that should get them

using those two tenses, e.g. All around me or In the evenings You

can then get students to read other peoples postcards with a task to do as

they are reading, for example to guess which place the person writing was

supposed to be in or to choose the best holiday.

6. Chain postcards

Especially if you have prepared sentence stems for the start of each line of

the postcard, you can combine the ideas in Postcards above with the

famously fun game Chain Writing (= Consequences). Each person fills in

the first line of a postcard, e.g. completing I am writing to you fromwith the best holiday resort ever or the hills of Tuscany. They

fold over the paper so that the next person cant see what they have written

and pass it to the next person for them to continue the postcard. They

continue writing and passing until the postcards are finished, then they arepassed one last time and opened for general hilarity and a discussion about


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which postcards make most sense, sound like the best holiday and/or are

funniest.

7. Present Simple and Continuous taboo topics

The strange thing about the use of the Present Continuous to talk about thepresent is that we actually rarely use it in conversation, and least of all to

ask typical textbook questions like What are you wearing? In fact,

questions like What kind of underwear are you wearing? are basically

taboo. We can take advantage of this by giving a list of such taboo Present

Continuous questions mixed up with similarly taboo Present Simple

questions like How often do you shave your armpits? If we sprinkle in a

few more typical and harmless questions such as What time do you

usually get up?, we can ask students to rank the questions from 5 points

(taboo) to 1 point (easy to answer), then decide on which ranking ofquestion they want to be asked. How many points they actually get depends

on how well they answer the question. For example, if they ask for a four

point question (usually uncomfortable to answer but not really taboo) and

kind of answer it but with lots of pausing and some avoiding of the

question, their partners can decide to reward them with two points (half thetotal of four points that they could have got).

8. Ask and tell

Students make Present Continuous and Present Simple questions, then flip a

coin to see whether they will have to answer the question themselves (tails

= tell) or be allowed to ask the question to someone else (heads = ask). This

is more fun than it sounds because many present tense questions are quitepersonal and the person who has made the question will often be dismayed

by having to answer their own question. You can make this more risqu and

add vocabulary by suggesting words and expressions that they can or must

include in their questions, e.g. snore and itchy. Alternatively, they

could roll a dice to decide which tense they should use in their questions(e.g. Present Simple if they throw a one, two or three), or the topic they

should ask about (e.g. families if they throw a one).

9. Time zones

If you give students a list of countries in different time zones, they should

be able to make sentences about what is probably happening there right

now, as well as their impressions of what daily life is like, e.g. People areprobably coming home from bars about now. I think they often stay up until

very late but sleep after lunch to describe their picture of Spanish life.Their partners should listen and guess the country.


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10. Guess the person

You can also get the students to describe and guess different kinds of

people from what they are (probably) doing now and their routines, e.g.

your mother-in-law from She texts my husband several times a day and

At this time she is probably doing a flower arrangement class.

11. Describe a photo

Perhaps the most natural situation in which to use a mix of the two tenses isto describe a photo containing people that you know, for example The

person standing next to my brother is his girlfriend. She lives in Canada, so

they only meet a few times a year.

12. Tour guides

A group of people who probably use the two tenses together more than the

rest of us is tour guides, for example to explain what is happening in a

painting and how many people come to see it every day. The same

language is fairly natural to describe Tower Bridge opening, Big Ben

striking twelve, and a herd of wildebeest running across the plains. You can

use this situation by asking students to guess the tourist site from the

descriptions and then make up their own descriptions for other people toguess from, or with roleplays in which the people on the tour keep on

asking more and more questions.

13. Test your classmates

Students test each other on the present dress and actions and routines of

their classmates with questions like What is George wearing on his feet?

and Does Ronaldo often wear glasses? Students will need to have theireyes closed when they are being tested, and they might need to check some

of the answers with the person who the question is about.

14. Sentence completion

Give students incomplete sentences for them to complete to give true

personal information, e.g. I am feeling __________, I often feel

__________, I rarely __________ and My brother is __________. Students

read out just the part they have filled in (e.g. cook or hungover) and

their partners guess which sentence they put those words in.

15. Discussion questions

You can easily make discussion questions with the Present Simple and

Present Continuous, e.g. What things are getting better in your country?


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and Do people in your country pay attention to government campaigns?

Why/why not? You can also use both tenses for sentences that students

should agree or disagree with, e.g. People buy brands because they think

they are better quality and People are slowly becoming more ecologically

friendly in their lifestyles. Alternatively, you can give questions which

arent written in those tenses but should elicit answers that are, e.g.Describe the changes in the economy of your country at the moment.

Fun Practice For The Simple PastDrilling games and communicative activities for intensive practice of the

Past Simple


The Simple Past is in many ways easier than the Present Simple, with no

third person S to worry about. Students can still need intensive practice,especially to stop themselves from slipping into present tenses halfway

through a story and to be able to produce irregular forms quickly and with

good pronunciation. Some students might also need some help with

understanding and/or producing the pronunciations of ed endings.Here are some ideas of how to do so:

StorytellingWe often use present tenses and other past tenses such as Past Continuous

to give our anecdotes a bit of colour, but it is perfectly possible to construct

a simple linear story with just the Simple Past. Perhaps the easiest way to

prompt storytelling is to give groups of students a set of cards to make a

story from, with each card being a word, phrase or picture. To practise the

regular and/or irregular verb forms, those cards could be verbs in the

infinitive.

AnecdotesThe most common thing to tell stories about is yourself. As people liketalking about themselves, anything on anecdotes tends to work well. The

challenge is to give the person listening a reason to do so. Things theycould do while listening include working out which anecdotes arent true,


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asking as many questions as they can when the anecdote is finished, and

interrupting the anecdote as much as they can to ask questions. You can add

intensive practice of particular verbs by giving them ones they have to

include in their stories, especially if they are allowed to make some of the

stories up.

Video tasks for Simple PastThe obvious way of using a video for past tenses might seem to simplydescribe what happened, but in fact this is difficult to do without using Past

Perfect and Past Continuous. One more controlled way of using a video is

to give them a list of verbs and ask them to put up their hands when they

think they can use one to describe what just happened. Another one is to

give them pairs of actions and ask them to predict the order, e.g. Mr Bean

bought some balloons and then snatched a bow and arrow, then watch and

check. Alternatively, you could ask them to make any true sentences aboutwhat just happened in the video that they can, but only using irregular

verbs, verbs with a particular vowel sound, or verbs with a particular

pronunciation of the -ed ending.

What did the teacher do then?You can do something similar to the video tasks above by doing a string of

actions and asking the students to say or write all the things you did. Thishas most impact if you dont tell them what you are going to do but simply

start the lesson in an unusual way such as turning round twice and kicking

the bin. Do about ten more strange actions and then walk out the door.

When you come back in, ask them to say or write all the things you did.

They could then work in groups to write down sequences of strange actions

to do and test other groups with in the same way that you just did. As the

ultimate challenge, they could all do their lists of actions at the same time

and the people watching could also try to remember who did what action.

Who did what?This is similar to the last idea above. Students are given some cards with

verbs or whole actions on (e.g. Jump or Jump next to the teachers desk

twice). Several students stand up and do their actions at the same time, and

the people sitting down have to say or write down who did what, plus inwhat order if each student had more than one card.


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Guess my lifeStudents can also do something similar with actions that they did outside

the classroom. In one version, students say an action they did yesterday or

this morning and the other students try to make true sentences including the

time, e.g. You brushed your teeth at 7:30. The person whose action it is

gives hints like No, much later until their partners get it exactly right.You can also do it the other way round by one student giving the time andthe others trying to guess what they did at that time. You can also do

similar things with months and years, e.g. You lived in England in 2000.

Another possibility is to tell the story of someones day or life in order. In

groups of three or four, one person has his or her story told and corrects the

other people if they say something which isnt true. One person says You

got up and the next person continues with anything that happened soon

(but not necessarily just) after that, e.g. You made a cup of coffee.Theycan continue that way through the whole day or stop whenever someone

makes a mistake and switch roles.

Fun drillingAs well as the communicative ideas above, it is well worth spending some

time on drilling the forms and pronunciation of the Simple Past. The easiest

way is to give them tables of irregular verbs and ask them to test each otherin pairs. A more fast-paced drilling game is Past Forms Tennis, where the

person serving does so with an infinitive and the person returning must do

so with the correct past form. With young learners you can even do this

with a real beach ball, making it more like Past Forms Volleyball.

An even more intensive game is Grammar Reversi. Prepare cards with the

infinitive on one side and the past on the other. Students have to guess the

form on the other side to be able to turn the card over and continue their

turn, either to play a whole game of Othello (as in the original game in thebook Grammar Games) or just to work their way along the entire length of

a set of these cards that have been put on the table in a row.

A more physically active game for the same language is Stations. Students

must react in one of two ways depending on what they hear, e.g. raise their

right hands if they hear a word whose past tense ends with /t/ or run and

touch the right hand wall if they hear or see a word whose past form has athe same vowel sound as more.


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15 fun Past Continuous activitiesAmusing ways of giving students intensive practice of the Past Progressive

tense


1. Past Continuous Accusations

This is not only a classic activity for the Past Continuous, but also an all

time classic TEFL game. Students are given a list of strange actions and ask

their partners to come up with innocent reasons why they were doing those

things, e.g. When I saw you, you were painting over your windows. Why

were you doing that? I was turning my whole house into a big flag to

celebrate Independence Day. It is important that they say the When I sawyou part each time, to make the use of the Past Continuous realistic.

2. Past Continuous Alibi Game

This is another all time classic TEFL game. Students are divided into

suspects and alibis and they have to concoct a story of where they weretogether at the time of the crime. They are then questioned separately, and

too many differences between their stories mean that the suspect is guilty.

You can make this more specific to Past Continuous by only allowing the

detectives to ask questions about the time of the murder, e.g. What were

you talking about? and Where was the waitress standing?

3. Green Card

A more romantic version of The Alibi Game is to get students to pretend to

be a couple and make up the story of when they first met. The other

students then question them separately on the details of that first moment,

e.g. what perfume she was wearing and who was standing near them.

4. Past Continuous Mimes

Students mime an action and when their partner is sure what it is they shout

Stop! They then guess the action with the sentence When I shouted stop,

you were + ing, e.g. When I shouted stop, you were polishing your

fingernails on your shirt to show how proud you are. It is important to usethe When I shouted stop part of the sentence each time to make this the

right tense, as otherwise You polished your fingernails is more natural.


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5. Random pelmanism

Students take two cards at random and try to make a sentence including

those words or expressions with the Past Simple and Past Continuous. For

example, if they pick the words alligator and wallpaper, they could say

When I was covering my sons bedroom with teddy bear wallpaper, hesuddenly came in and said he wanted alligator patterns instead.

6. Past Continuous Things in common

Students try to find times when they were doing the exact same thing, e.g.

What were you doing at 7 oclock this morning? I was taking a shower

So was I! They cant use the same action more than once, e.g. only one

sentence about sleeping!

7. All kinds of actions

Put a list of actions on the board, e.g. tapping your fingers and

yawning. Ask students to do any of the actions in any order they like and

at some point shout Stop! The students then test each other on what their

classmates were doing at the time the teacher shouted stop with questions

like Who was polishing her fingernails? and What was Juan doing?

8. Past Continuous picture memory

Give students a picture that shows lots of people doing different actions,

e.g. a page from Wheres Wally? (=Wheres Waldo?) When they turn over

the picture so that they cant see it, test them on what people were doing

with questions like What was the oldlady doing?, How many people

were smoking? and Who was standing next to the counter? You can

make the use of the Past Continuous more natural by using a picture with aclock in or by making it a situation that people might really be asked these

questions about, e.g. the moment before a bank robbery.

9. Past Continuous memory challenge

Students try to ask each other What were you doing when you first/

last? questions that their partners cant remember the answer to, e.g.

What were you doing when you first tasted wine? or What were you

doing when you last saw a double-decker bus? You can also make this into

a bluff game by asking students who dont remember to make something

up, e.g. I was cleaning up after my parents birthday party or I was

flying low over London. Their partners then guess whether the answer is

true or not.


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10. Past photos

Students pretend that a blank piece of paper is an important photo of theirs

and describe it to their partners. As it is just as natural to use the Present

Continuous to describe the actual actions in the picture, they should also

describe what they were doing when the photo was taken (e.g. having theirhoneymoon), what people in the photo were doing at that time (e.g.

studying at university), what was happening outside the frame of the photo,etc.

11. Continual nagging

Students take turns complaining that they did all the work to prepare for

something like a party or presentation, e.g. While I was making the

sandwiches you answered your mobile three or four times or While I was

cleaning the tables you were staring atpretty women out of the window.The other person should also say they their action was more useful than it

seemed, e.g. Actually, I was waiting for the delivery van to arrive so that I

could bring the paper plates upstairs, or retaliate with a worse accusation

like While I was typing up the Powerpoint document, you were playing

poker on your computer.

12. Who was doing that?

Students make true sentences about what someone was doing when theysaw that person, and the other students guess who it was, e.g. He was

pulling across two lanes of traffic for a taxi driver or She was writing

something down in a notebook for a traffic warden.

13. Video task 1When the screen went blank

While students are watching a video, the teacher suddenly presses the stop

button. Students have to describe what was happening in as much detail as

they can, and then check when the teacher presses play.14. Video task 2Detailed viewing

When students have finished watching a short clip, test them on things that

were happening in the background, e.g. What was the window cleaner

doing when the hero was taking out his walkie talkie?

15. Video task 3Complicated cutting

Every time a character reappears on the screen, pause the video and test

students on what that person was doing last time we saw them.


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15 top fun pronunciation games

1. Shadow reading Students try to speak at exactly the same speed andrhythm as the CD, then try one more time with the sound turned down in

the middle of the recording to see if they are still in time when the sound is

turned back up. 2. Syllables snap Students take turns turning []


1. Shadow readingStudents try to speak at exactly the same speed and rhythm as the CD, then

try one more time with the sound turned down in the middle of the

recording to see if they are still in time when the sound is turned back up.

2. Syllables snapStudents take turns turning over cards with words written on them fromtheir packs. If the two words have the same number of syllables, the first

person to say Snap and/ or slap their hands down on the cards wins all the

cards that have been turned over so far. The person with most cards at the

end of the game is the winner. This also works with vowel sounds in one

syllable words and word stress.

3. Word stress pellmanism

Pellmanism (= pairs/ memory game) can be played with the same cards as

Snap, but is a slower game. All the cards are spread face down on the table

and students take turns trying to find matching pairs of cards by whichsyllable is stressed. This is easier if all of the words have the same number

of syllables. This game can also be played with students matching by vowel

sounds or number of syllables.

4. The yes?! gameStudents try to give as many different feelings and meanings to one word or

sentence as they can by varying the stress and intonation. The other

students guess what feeling they were trying to convey.

5. Yes. Yes! YES!Similar to The Yes?! Game, students compete to say a word or sentence in

the most extreme way they can, e.g. they take turns being as angry as

possible and the angriest person wins.

6. Sounds brainstorming board raceTeams of students try to write as many words with the sound they have


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been given on the board as quickly as possible. Each team member can only

write one word before they pass the pen onto someone else, but they can

prompt each other. This also works for number of syllables and word stress.

7. Minimal pairs stations

Students show which of two words they think they have heard by racing totouch one of the things that the teacher or class decided will be used to

represent that thing, e.g. the table for /l/ or the chair for /r/. More activeclasses can run and touch things like the door and the window, while shyer

classes can just raise their right and left hands.

8. Sounds same or differentIn this variation on Minimal Pairs Stations, rather than indicating which

sound they hear, students indicate if they think two words you say have the

same or different pronunciation. This is good for homophones as well asminimal pairs. The easiest way to explain the task is to give students pieces

of paper with Same and Different written on for them to hold up or

race to slap.

9. Sounds same or different pairwork

You can add lots more speaking practice, both controlled pron practice and

free conversation, to Sounds Same or Different by giving students

worksheets with the words you want them to compare highlighted on

Student A and Student B sheets. First they read out just the word to decideif the pron is the same or not, then they read out their different sentences to

see if the context gives them any more clues. When they have finished, they

can spell the words out to each other and then look at each others sheets.

10. Tell me when Im oddIn this variation of Sounds Same or Different, students listen to a whole

string of words with the same sound (e.g. the same vowel sound) and race

to indicate the first word they hear that is different.

11. Silently mouthingStudents try to identify the word or sentence that the teacher or a student is

mouthing silently. This is good for awareness of mouth position for English

sounds.

12. Sounds puzzle

You can get the logical parts of their brain working during pronunciation

practice by hiding the sounds that make up a word that is the answer to thepuzzle. Students find the sounds in common in each pair of words, put all

the sounds together (mixed up or in order) and write the word they make.


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13. Pronunciation mazeThis game also allows them to use a little bit of logical problem solving to

help with a pronunciation task. In a grid, write a string of words with a

common sound, e.g. the same vowel sound, between the top left corner and

the bottom right corner. In all the other squares, write in words that people

might think have the same sound but dont. Students then have to get fromthe starting point to the end by the right route. After they have finished,drill the words on the right route, and then all the surrounding ones with

different sounds.

14. Common pron picturesStudents draw lines between the pairs of words that share the same sound

on their sheet, and see what kind of picture is made by those lines. This can

take a lot of preparation, but is easier if you just have the thing they draw as

a letter of the alphabet, usually an upper case one as there are more straightlines.

15. No sounds listening comprehensionStudents try to identify which sentence in a dialogue the teacher or a

student has chosen without them using any English sounds. This can bedone by waving your arms around to show sentence stress or intonation, or

beating out the rhythm on the sentence on the table or your palm.

15-top fun activities and games for teaching english

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