ESL Teaching Games & Ideas

Learn and share fun ESL teaching tips!

ESL Teaching Games & Ideas

You've come to the right place if you are interested in learning or sharing some fun ways to spice up your ESL classroom. Everything you find here has been submitted by a member of the GO! community who has had experience teaching English abroad. We hope you find these teaching ideas useful and encourage you to share your own for the betterment of the community!

Becoming an English teacher is a great way to gain valuable teaching experience while traveling abroad. The work is fun and fulfilling, but like anything you get only from what you put in. Creating effective and imaginative ways to bring excitement to an ESL classroom everyday requires hard work. This is why it is best to learn from your peers and ESL teachers from around the world. Share your ideas and learn what works and what doesn't, but most of all concentrate on having fun!

Recent ESL Teaching Tips

Halloween Sense-ational

Remember when you were a kid and sometimes one class in elementary would create a haunted house for the rest of the school to go through? Well a part of that was the touch test-put your hand in bowls of yucky stuff that feels like brain or eyeballs but it's really spaghetti or peeled grapes.

Well this is the same idea. I've been going over the 6 question words (who, what, where, when, why, and how). How is the latter that this activity deals with, basically practicing adjectives. How does that feel?

Submitted by adunkle on Mon, 03/29/2010 - 22:27

Avoid Group Chaos!

There are two things I have found really helpful with group work in an ESL classroom:

1. When I had planned group work or activity as a part of the lesson, I kept creating chaotic situations. My problem: I arranged the groups, then gave the instructions for what to do. By the time the groups were formed, I had lost the control. I ended up having to go from group to group to explain what we were doing. This may be a trivial point to experienced teachers, but I learned that I must give all the instructions and demonstrate the activity BEFORE I'd have the students go into groups.

Submitted by adunkle on Mon, 03/22/2010 - 22:27

Concentration Game

I'm sure we're all familiar with the game concentration? Well, I've adjusted it to teach, practice and review the past/present tense, especially the irregular verb forms, which most esl students find confusing. For elementary kid s its great. If you compile all the verbs you can think of, you'll have quite a large game. The students are allowed to flip over 2 cards trying to find a match. If they have a match they get to take it. If they don't have a match, they have to verbal ly identify what words should match their two cards and replace the cards. Depending on the level I may make them form sentences in order to take the cards when they make a match. If they do get a match, they get to try again.

Submitted by adunkle on Mon, 03/15/2010 - 22:28

Banana Banana

You can play this game at the end of a lesson or as a review game. You write all the vocab words from the days lesson or the weeks unit on the white board then have all the students repeat them as you write them down. Next send one student out of the room and erase one off the words, then on the count of three have all the students yell "Banana,banana!!!". The student outside the classroom comes back in and has to guess the right word, but none of the other kids can tell them the answer. Reward the student with a team or individual point.

Submitted by adunkle on Mon, 03/08/2010 - 22:29

Bulls and Bears

Numbers can often be a challenge for Business English students, especially given over the telephone. Ask your students to read the stock market reports to you ( by phone ) - what's up, down, decimal points in currency markets, trends, - you may even pick up some tips!

Submitted by adunkle on Mon, 03/01/2010 - 22:29