Easy Class Ideas

This is a mingle activity for your English class, 15+ students. Each student has a piece of paper with some questions on it. Students have to move around the class, asking each other the questions until they have a different name for each question. In my class, 10 questions = 10 different student names. Its fast, fun, a little bit loud but it gets your students talking to each other. For older or higher level students I ask them to get some additional information. Question: Who read a book last night? Name: David. The extra information might be the name of the book, how long he read for, who is the main character, etc, etc... The word document here is three different examples that I have used in class: FindSomeoneWho

 A PowerPoint with 23 Would you Rather questions for your English class.  It's a great speaking activity for tennage and adult students. Perfect for expressing some opinions. Download for free: Would you Rather  or watch on YouTube .

 The pyramid game is based on a famous American  TV show. Students have to describe 5 words from a vocabulary category to their classmates. They can tell their classmates the category before they describe the words. It is a great game to practice using relative clauses. Or vice versa, students can use the 5 words listed so that their classmates can guess the category. Use a time limit for each turn, try to encourage your students not to use gestures, i.e. their hands, facial expressions, etc. Download the printable here: Pyramid Game

I use this activity with small groups of teenagers or adults when I have some time to kill at the start or end of class. Ask everybody to take out their keys and then each student describes them. This key is for the house, my car, etc, etc. Most people have one or more key rings as well. Students can explain where they got it, is it a present, how long they have had it, etc, etc. Questions like When did you get your first key? Have you ever lost or found keys? Basically 5 to 10 minutes to kill some time in class with no preparation needed.

To play taboo you describe an English word and another person has to guess what the word been described is. The word can be a food, an animal, a famous person or place, the name of a movie, a school subject, anything you want. Of course you don't say the word. Teacher: It is an animal. It has a trunk, it has big ears, it is the biggest land animal, etc... Student: Is it an elephant? When I play I usually describe three or four words to the class first. They learn how to play and I can control the class. The words I choose depends on their level and age. I emphasis that the description has to be three or more sentences, students have to wait until the description is finished before guessing the word and students only get one guess each. Then I pick a student to describe one of the words I have prepared. I usually pick a strong student to go first. Later after the class has played several times, I put them into groups and give each group a list of words to play t

Who am I? is a great activity for students to practice asking and answering questions in English class. The aim of the activity is to find out WHO you are. Are you a famous actor or actress, a sports star, a musician, a politician, a famous character from a movie or a book, etc... Each student has a piece of paper or a postit with a name on it, a secret name. To find out who you are, you have to ask other students in your class questions to get information about yourself. Am I a man? Am I French? Do I have blond hair? Am I young or old? Am I singer? ... I like to put my students into small groups, 4 or 5 students. I give them  20 to 30 names to go through. Each of them get several different names to discover who they are. Another option I like is to get the whole class to mingle. Each student can only ask each student in the class one question at a time. When a student discovers who they are, they can ask me for another piece of paper with a different name

Topic circle is a fun game to practice volcabulary. Need: Pieces of paper cut out with different categories written on each, e.g. Sport / Transport / Colours / Animals. Make groups with 4 or 5 students. Stack the pieces face down on a table. Turn one over. This is the category for your students. Going around in a circle your students take turns to say a word related to the category. Transport : Car! Bus! Plane! Bike! and so on..... If a student can not think of a word, repeats a word already said or takes too long, the game stops. Turn another piece of paper over and start again.  Sport : Football! Swimming! ........... You can write your own categories, the vocabulary your students are learning or you can print the one I use here: TopicCircle Enjoy!!

What do you Need to Play: An empty box / container and 40/50/60 pieces of paper with an English word written on each one. You can download my list of words here if you wish: FishBowlWords The idea of the game is to guess the words on the pieces of paper. Your students play in groups of 4 if possible. Each student will have one turn out of 4 rounds. Guess the word correctly, take another word out of the box until time runs out. Normally 90 seconds to 2 minutes is my time limit. The 4 rounds are Taboo , Pictionary , Mime and Word . Taboo : Describe the word until your teammates guess the word. Pictionary : Draw a picture to describe the word. ( no writing allowed ) Mime : Act out the word by miming, gesturing, acting it out, making sounds is fun too. Word: Use only one word to describe the word on the piece of paper. if your teammates guess incorrectly, another word can be said and so on.        For example: Word: Monkey. Student animal, Group dog, Student jungle, Group

Paper Plane is a fun English game where the students make a paper airplane to make reading and writing sentences in English class more fun. On a piece of paper, ask the students to write five, six or as many sentences as you wish. The topic can be anything the teacher chooses. About yourself, what you did for your holidays, last weekend, pick an animal and describe it, etc but don't write your name on it. It's a secret. When the students are finished, ask them to make a paper plane. When all the paper planes are finished, together everybody throws the paper plane into the air and then each student picks up somebody else's paper plane. Each student opens the paper plane, reads it and then each student guesses who wrote it. Alternatively each student can read the sentences to the class and the class can guess who wrote it. This is good for correcting grammar mistakes that the students have made. This game can be a little bit noisy but it is a great an

I use this alphabet game to practice vocabulary and to get my students to write sentences. I put my students into groups of threes:  The first student picks a letter , the next student thinks of a word with this letter and the last student makes a sentence with this word.  Student: P  Student: Potato.  Student: I ate potatoes for my dinner two days ago. The aim of the activity is to write a word and sentence for every letter of the alphabet. The students take turns choosing a letter, thinking of a word and making a sentence. With 26 letters each student will write at least 8 sentences. Download the worksheet AlphabetGame.   Another option is to ask your students to write the alphabet on a piece of paper and do the activity orally. Cross out each letter after they have thought of a word and made a sentence. Before starting the activity I ask my students not to repeat the same sentence over and over again. For example I often get:

Taboo is a fun activity for students to play in English class. Students describe the word in black without using the words in red to their classmate, their group or to the whole class. Students guess the word in black after listening to the description. 20 Taboo words to guess using PowerPoint on a whiteboard. Lower level students can use the red words to help in their description. Download the PowerPoint for free. Taboo Enjoy.