Vocabulary Challenge Games for Young Learners

Laurie Thain – Canada

Age: 6-10

Time: 20 minutes

Large classes: No

Mixed level: Yes

Materials: Flashcards.

Organization : Whole class activity.

Aim: To learn new vocabulary.

Description: In this game the class have to guess what is on a card chosen by one of the children.

Preparation: You will need to make flashcards of the new vocabulary items (we use furniture here). There should be one card for each child in the class.

Procedures

1. Ask the children to sit in a circle. Teach the children the words on the flashcards. There are lots of ways you can do this. We suggest the following: show each card and say the word. Children repeat. Show the cards again in a different order and ask the children to say the correct word. Help them if necessary. Then give each child a card. The children show the cards one-by-one and the class says the word. The children can then put cards face down in front of them and the teacher asks, ‘What card does Mary have/has Mary got?’ and the children have to remember. If they are right, the card is turned face up.
2. When all the cards have been learnt, you can play the game. Choose one leader and one helper. The helper gathers all the cards and the leader chooses one which they put face down on the floor. The helper holds the remaining flashcards. The children take turns asking the leader questions. For example, if the vocabulary set is domestic animals, the children might ask, ‘Do you have the chair?’ The leader answers, ‘Yes I do’ or ‘No I don’t’. If ‘Yes’, the lucky guesser becomes the leader and chooses a new card to turn face down and there is a new helper assigned. If ‘No’, the helper turns up the ‘cat’ so all can see it. Then children take it in turns to ask a question until someone guesses correctly and becomes the leader

Notes

You can play lots of rounds of this game or just a few – it is up to you! It is also a really useful activity for revising vocabulary previously taught.

Alternatives

• The teacher can be the leader. If a child guesses the card correctly, they keep it. At the end of the game, when all the cards have been collected, the children take it in turns to say what they have, for example, ‘I have a chair, a table and a cupboard’.
• Hatice Elif Kalaycioglu (Turkey) suggests the following alternative: instead of sitting in a circle, the children stand in a circle. The teacher plays some music and the children walk round the cards. When the music stops, the teacher calls out the item of vocabulary. The children have to point to the correct picture card. If you want to make this into a competition, the last child to point and any children who points to the wrong card can be ‘out’, until only one child remains. She also suggests putting the pictures on the board. The children can be divided into two teams, A and B. The teacher calls out one item of vocabulary and the first member of the team has to go to the board and either take the correct picture or point at it. The first child to do so wins the point.
• The same activities can be used to practise sound/spelling associations. Instead of pictures, write the words on the cards, or use a mixture of picture and word cards. The children have to collect both the correct picture and word cards.
• Ask the children to cut pictures out of magazines, newspapers etc and stick them on card (laminate them if you can). Over time, you can build up a class collection of picture cards that can be used for a number of different activities.

No Resources

Flashcards do not have to be of professional quality. Basic drawings on scrap paper are fine.

Reference

Crazy Animals and Other Activities for Teaching English to Young Learners PDF

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Simon Says

Age: 7++
Material: learning about Verb
Organization: Whole Class
Time: 20-25 minutes
Aim: To practice or revise a new vocabulary set
Description: Children stand in front of the classroom. They learn a new vocabulary set
Preparation: You will need to prepare the words or verb vocabularies you want the children to learn
Procedures 

1. Stand in front of the class (you are Simon for the duration of this game).
2. Do an action and say Simon Says [action]. The students must copy what you do.
3. Repeat this process choosing different actions - you can be as silly as you like and the sillier you are the more the children will love you for it.
4. Then do an action but this time say only the action and omit 'Simon Says'. Whoever does the action this time is out and must sit down.
5. The winner is the last student standing.
6. To make it harder, speed up the actions. Reward children for good behavior by allowing them to play the part of Simon.

Note:
The danger of this games sometimes children does not want to stop playing this games

Reference
10 Best Games for ESL Teacher Abroad Link

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Swap the Dot

Antonella—Italy
Age: 8-9
Times: 15 minutes
Materials: Circles of card. Each circle has either a color or a number on it. Use actual colors and write numbers (e.g. 5), rather than writing the words.
Organization: Whole class.
Aim: To practice recognizing and saying number words and colors.
Description: Each child has a card with either a color or a number. The teacher calls out a number and a color. The children with these cards must stand up, shout out their colors or numbers, and swap cards.
Preparation: You will need to prepare the card circles, depending on the number of children in the class. For 20 children, you will need 10 color cards and 10 number cards. The colors can be red, yellow, pink, blue, green, black, white, grey, orange, brown, for example.
Procedures

1. Ask the children to stand in a circle and give each one a card.
2. Practice the vocabulary. You can do this by pointing to each card, saying the word and asking the children to repeat; by saying a word and asking the child with the card to hold it up; by going round the circle and asking each child to say their word, and so on. 
3. Now play the game. Call out a number and a color, for example, five and orange. The children with these cards must come to the center, shout out their words and then swap their cards.
4. Repeat until all the children have swapped cards. 
5. Now ask each child to say what is on their new card.

Notes:
Once you have made the cards, you can use them to revise colors and numbers. You can also write the color or number on the back of the cards and use these to teach the written form.
Alternatives

1. If you have a larger class, you can add another group to the numbers and colors, for example, animals. The teacher then calls out three words – for example, ‘5, blue, tiger’ – and the children swap three cards.
2. When the children have all swapped cards, they can put them face down and the class can try to remember which child has which card.
3. Put all the cards face down on the floor (with the number/colour facing the floor). Children take it in turns to turn up two cards. If they can say the names correctly, they keep the cards. If not, the cards are put back in the same place.

Reference 
Crazy Animals and Other Activities for Teaching English to Young Learners Download PDF 

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I Have It in My Name

By Issoofu Kanda Ibrahim—Niger
Age: All age
Times: 15-20 minutes
Materials: None.
Organization: Group work and whole class.
Aim: To practise/revise the alphabet and numbers. To practise listening for specific information, pronunciation of numbers and letters.
Description: This activity is a simple and fun way to revise the alphabet and numbers and is also quite cognitively challenging for children as they have to associate letters and numbers.
Preparation: No preparation is needed for this activity.
Procedures:
The teacher
Say a number and a letter, for example, ‘three, M’. Tell the children that if they have an ‘M’ as the third letter in their name, they should raise their hand. All the children who have M as the third letter in their name raise their hands and then take it in turns to spell out their name together with the numbers corresponding to the position of each letter.
For example:
Teacher: Three M Child: My name is Asma, one A, two S, three M, four A
Notes:
You might want to explain the activity in the children’s first language as the instructions are quite complicated!
Alternative

1. The children can take it in turns to choose the letter and the number.
2. The game can be made easier by calling out just a letter and asking the children whose name begins with that letter to spell their names, along with the numbers.For example: Teacher: OChild: My name is Oscar. One O, two S, three C, four A, five R.
3. Spelling games can be popular with children. A simple spelling game is to split the class into groups. Give Group A a word to spell. One child in the group starts to spell the word. If they get it right, award a point. If wrong, stop the child (perhaps with a buzzer sound) as soon as the wrong letter is given. The turn passes to Team B, who now knows where the mistake has been made. A child from Team B now tries to spell the word. If correct, award a point. If not, stop at the wrong letter in the same way and the turn moves to Team C. For example: Teacher: Team A: AustraliaTeam A: A–STeacher: BUZZ! Team BTeam B: A-U-S-T-R-E Teacher: BUZZ. Team CTeam C: A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A Teacher: Well done! Team C one point.

Reference
Crazy Animals and Other Activities for Teaching English to Young Learners Download PDF

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Hammer Buttles

Weronika Poland
Age: 5-9
Times: 10-15 minutes
Materials: Flashcards and two plastic hammers.
Organization: Whole class.
Aim: To practise or revise vocabulary.
Description: After practising vocabulary items on flashcards, children show what they have remembered by locating the correct flashcard and hitting it with a plastic hammer.
Preparation: You need to prepare flashcards with all the words you want to practise/revise. You will need around 10 to 12 cards and two plastic hammers!
Procedures:

1. Ask the children to sit in a circle on the floor. Spread all the flashcards face up on the floor in front of the children.
2. Revise the words and the correct pronunciation of the items on the flashcards. The children can all point to the correct word first, then repeat the word, then individual children can say the word. 
3. After all the words have been revised, give two children a plastic hammer each. Say one of the words on the flashcards. The children locate the flashcard and hit it with the hammer. The first to hit is the winner. 
4. The children pass the hammer to the child on their left and the game continues. 
5. When the children know the words from the flashcards quite well, ask one of them to take over your role and shout out the words.

Notes:
This is a lot of fun and as long as you only have two hammers, it should be fairly easy to control!
Alternatives

1. If there is not enough space on the floor, the flashcards can be attached to the board.
2. If you do not like the idea of hitting the cards, children can stand on the cards or grab the cards (but this can cause arguments). 
3. In larger classes you can do steps one and two using the board, with the children sitting in their seats. You can then divide the class into two circles to play the game. In this case, you will need two sets of cards. 
4. If you do not have hammers, you can play an alternative version. Carry out steps one and two as explained. Then start to turn the cards over by asking the children in turn to identify a word and then turn it face down. When all the flashcards are face down, repeat the process. This time it is more difficult as children have to remember where the flashcard was!

Reference 
Crazy Animals and Other Activities for Teaching English to Young Learners Download PDF

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Fly the Airplane, Pilot!

By Juliana Cavalieri Goncales—Brazil
age: 5-10
Times: 10-20 minutes
Materials: A piece of paper for each child.
Organization: Whole class.
Aim: To revise language from previous lessons.
Description: The children make paper airplanes. They then answer questions and if they get the right answers, they have the opportunity to throw their planes at ‘targets’ in the room to score points for their team.
Preparation: You will need to prepare a set of questions based on work you have been doing with the children. This might be some vocabulary, a story, some grammar.
Procedures:

1. Give each child a piece of paper and then show them how to fold a paper airplane. Be prepared to help children who struggle.
2. Let the children play for a short time with their airplanes. 
3. Divide the children into teams. 
4. Now decide with the children which parts of the classroom are going to be ‘targets’. Assign a number to each target. Easy targets will have a low number, for example the table could be worth 5 points. Difficult targets will have a high number, for example the trash can might be worth 20 points. The most difficult target should be worth a good lot, for example, 50 points for the clock. 
5. The children stand in lines in their teams at the front of the class with their airplanes. Ask the first question to the front row of children. The first child to raise their hand has to answer. If the answer is right, they get the chance to throw the airplane at a target of choice. If the airplane hits the target, the child gets the points. If the answer is wrong, another child can try to answer. All the first row must then go to the back of their lines so the next set of children can have a turn. 
6. The team that scores the most points is the winner!

Notes:
Once the airplanes have been made, they can be kept for the next time. You can have any number of teams, depending on the number of children in the class and the space you have. In a mixed ability class, try to make sure that children of similar ability are in the same row so that you can adapt the question to the children.
Alternatives

1. In small classes the children can play individually.
2. The teacher can create a running total over a week, month or term so that the game can be played frequently but for a short time only.
3. The children can decorate their planes or make modifications to make them fly better.
4. Maria Stakhovskya (Russia) offers an alternative to airplanes. She suggests that you bring in soft balls and skittles/objects to knock down. After answering the question, the children can try to knock down the skittles. They score points depending on the number of skittles they knock down. If you use objects, the children can try to hit the objects with the soft balls. If they are successful, they say something about the object they hit.

Reference
Crazy Animals and Other Activities for Teaching English to Young Learners Download PDF

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Creative Chair

By Silvama Rampone—Italy
Age: 6-10
Times: 30 minutes 
Materials: A4 paper, felt tip pens, scissors, glue, dance music and equipment to play it on.
Organisation: Group work and whole class.
Aim: To practice speaking and writing.
Description: In this activity, children co-operate in drawing pictures, developing their creativity through collaborative work and also developing their communicative and thinking skills.
Preparation: You will need a piece of paper and a colored pen for each child.
Procedures

1. Ask the children to place their chairs in a circle. Give one sheet of A4 paper and a felt tip pen to each child. Use as many different colors as possible. Tell the children to write their names on the back of their piece of paper.
2. Tell the children to sit on their chairs and to draw anything they like on the piece of paper.
3. Tell the children that when they hear music, they have to start dancing around the chairs. When the music stops, the children should stop and stand behind the nearest chair and draw another picture on the paper on the chair they are standing behind. 
4. Start the music. 
5. When the music stops, the children go to the nearest chair (not their own) and add a drawing to the paper they find there. Continue this procedure until you see that the papers are quite full of drawings. 
6. Ask the children to go back to the chair they started from and look at the drawings. The children then take it in turns to hold up their pictures and describe what they see to the rest of the class. They can use the chunk ‘I can see...’ to introduce the pictures. You can help them with any new words they need. 
7. After describing their pictures, the children can then write a story, including as many of the pictures on the piece of paper as possible.

Notes
If you have a large class, you can organize the children into two or three circles.
Alternatives

1. You can extend this by asking all the children to hold up their pens. The child describing the picture can identify who did the drawings and say ‘This is Davide’s picture’ or ‘Davide drew this picture’ or ‘This was done by Davide’ or whatever phrase might be useful for your class to practise.
2.  The children hold up their pictures for the class. Play the game ‘I spy’. Children take it in turns to say ‘I spy with my little eye ...’ finishing the sentence with the names of objects in the pictures, for example, ‘I spy with my little eye a flower’. The other children have to find all the pictures with flowers in them and point to them.
3.  The children cut out the objects from their drawings. Place all the cut out pictures on the floor and ask the children to sort them out so that all drawings of the same object are together (flowers, houses, people etc).
4.  Put a large poster-size sheet of paper on the floor or on a desk and ask the children to stick the objects on it to make a display using singular and plural forms. Write on the poster (or ask the children to write) one flower six flowers (depending on how many there are on the poster). Draw the children’s attention to any irregular plurals and how they are formed.
5. Give each group a piece of poster-size paper. The children cut the objects out of their pictures and rearrange them on the poster, leaving some space at the bottom. When they’re happy with the layout, they can glue them onto the paper to make the new picture. The children can then colour the background, give their poster a title and write a short description of it at the bottom.
6. The children make an accordion book of their story by sticking the pictures in the right sequence. They then write short sentences for each stage of the story.

Reference
Crazy animals and other activities for teaching English to young learner book Download PDF 

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Toothpick Game

By Weronika Salandyk—Poland
Age: 8+
Times: maximum 20 minutes
Materials: Toothpicks and pictures of people doing things.
Organization: Group work.
Aim: To practice making sentences describing the pictures.
Description: Children work in pairs or groups. They take it in turns to make sentences about the pictures, and use the toothpicks to show which part of the picture they are describing.
Preparation: You will need to find suitable pictures of people doing things. These can be pictures from your course book, pictures from magazines, a photocopied picture or a flashcard. The important thing is that there is a lot of activity in the picture. Make sure you have enough toothpicks to bring to class.
Procedures

1. Divide the class into pairs or groups of no more than four. Give each pair/group a set of about 12–20 toothpicks.
2. Give each pair or group a picture. 
3. Tell the children that they have to take it in turns to make sentences about the pictures. Elicit some examples using one of the pictures, or a picture you put on the board. 
4. Here is the fun part. As the children make a sentence, they must put a toothpick on to the picture, so that the point of the toothpick touches the part of the picture that the child is describing. The next child then makes a sentence, following the same procedure. However, this child’s toothpick must touch the picture and also the previous toothpick, like in a dominos game. 
5. The children get one point for each toothpick they manage to lay down. The child who places all their toothpicks first is the winner.

Note
You might need to cut the toothpicks in half if the pictures are small.
Alternatives

1. If you have children of different levels, you can differentiate the kind of sentences they must make. For example, lower level children can make sentences with adjectives while higher level children can make sentences with particular tense patterns.
2. You can add a level of challenge by insisting that the children cannot move existing toothpicks when they lay down their toothpick, or they lose a point.

Reference
Crazy animals and other activities for teaching English to young learner book  Download PDF

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The Snake Game

By Marina Kolar—Croatia
Age: 7+
Times: 10-20 minutes
Materials: board and markers (either magnets or some sort of sticker, such as a sticky note), a dice.
Organization: Whole class.
Aim: To practice or revise vocabulary and structures.
Description: Children in the class are divided into two teams. Individuals from each team must answer questions dictated by a square on the board snake.
Preparation: You will need to prepare a series of questions based on the categories in your snake (see Step 1 below).
Procedures

1. Draw a large snake on the board and divide its body into a number of squares (at least 15). In each square write a letter as a prompt to the category of question. For example, V might be a ‘vocabulary’ question; C might be ‘correct the sentence’, while O might be ‘odd man out.’
2. Divide the class into two teams. Explain the rules of the game. A member from each team comes to the front and shakes a dice. According to the number on the dice, they move forward up the snake’s body. On reaching the number, the child places the marker on the square and has to answer a question, according to the letter. If the child is not sure of the answer, they can ask the rest of the team.  
3. If the child answers correctly, the marker remains on the square. If the question is answered incorrectly, the child moves the marker three squares down the snake. The winning team is the first to reach the snake’s tongue.

Notes
Other categories you might consider are ‘translation’, ‘spelling’ and ‘pronunciation’. Larger classes will need more teams.
Alternatives

1. The children could prepare questions for each other based on the categories.
2. Children from the opposing team could read out the questions in a ‘snakey’ voice. They could also decide if the answer is right or wrong (if they get it wrong, they move down the snake two spaces).

Reference
Crazy animals and other activities for teaching English to young learner book  Download PDF

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Memory Game

Ester Biancy—Itali
Age          : 6-10
Times      : 30 minutes
Materials: Sets of cards with words and drawings/pictures of fruit (or other vocabulary group), one    set for each group of four.
Organization: Group work, whole class.
Aim: To introduce and practice vocabulary, to practice pronunciation.
Description: This is an adaption of the classic card-matching game sometimes called Pelmanism. In this version the children have to find picture/word combinations, but there are a number of variations.
Preparation: You will need to create sets of cards – at least 14 cards in each set. To explain the activity we are using fruit as the vocabulary set, but you can choose whichever vocabulary you like. On seven cards draw/stick pictures of fruit and on the other seven, write the names of the fruit.
Procedure

1. Show the pictures cards to the children and repeat the words all together.
2. Show the children the word cards with the picture cards and repeat again. 
3. Divide the class into groups of four and give each group a set of cards. One child in each group shuffles the cards and lays them face down on the desk. 
4. The children take it in turns to turn over two cards to try and find a picture-word pair. If the child is successful, they say the name of the fruit and take the card and turns over two more cards. If they are not successful, the cards are turned face down again and the next child has a turn. The child with the most cards at the end is the winner.

Notes
In activities where the children are working in groups, especially in competitive games such as this one, it can useful to nominate one child in each group as the group leader and give them responsibility for leading the activity and monitoring it.
Alternatives

1. This game can be played with any vocabulary set. It can be played with sound/ letter pairs, such as the letter “C” and a picture of a car.
2. The same game could be played with question/ answer pairs or with matching sentence halves to practice grammar points. For example, matching tenses and adverbs: one set cards has time adverbs such as yesterday, twice a day, since 2000, next week. The other set has phrases such as I went to the doctors’, I’m not feeling well, I brush my teeth, I’ve been at this school, I’m going to the USA. 
3. The children can draw the pictures on pieces of paper/card in preparation for the game.
4.  Gulanara Janova (Georgia) suggests another game with cards which she calls ‘Fishing’. Put the prepared vocabulary picture cards, or objects into a box or bag. Ask the children to come to the front one at a time to pick a picture/object out of the bag/box – tell them they are ‘catching a fish’. The child who has caught a fish has to name it. If they name it correctly, they take it back to their seat. If they cannot name it, they have to put it back in the bag/box. The child with the most ‘fish’ at the end is the winner. This activity can also be used to revise/practise grammar, for example, children can describe their picture (e.g. ‘It’s a big, black cat’) or say what their classmates have caught (e.g. ‘I have a cat, Dana has a horse, Ivan has a duck and Josi has a lion.’).

Reference
Crazy animals and other activities for teaching English to young learner book  Download PDF

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Chain Games

By Eliana Fernandez Malla- Dominican Republic and Jekaterina Mazure- Latvia
Material          : Flashcard
Organization   : Whole Class
Time               : 20-25 minutes
Aim                : To practice or revise a new vocabulary set
Description     : Children sit in a circle. They learn a new vocabulary set (For example.   Vegetables)
Preparation     : You will need to prepare flasscard of the words you want the children to learn
Procedures:

1.  Introduce a set of words you want the children to learn, for example fruit and vegetables through flashcard. After practicing the pronunciation, stick the card on the board (you might want to write the word under the card)
2.  Ask the children to sit in a circle. explain they will have to use the flashcards to try to remember a list of words 
3. Introduce the phrase. “My auntie went to market, and she bought an apple’. The first child should add to the list, using another word from the flashcard, in the following way: ‘My auntie went to market and she bought an apple and some carrots’. The activity goes on with each child adding to the list after having repeated all the items before  
4. Repeat the activity, but this time take the flashcard off the board and erase any writing
5. Note:You can help children who are struggling by mouthing the words in the list

Alternatives :

1.  It is not necessary to teach a set of vocabulary first. The children can add whatever they like to the list from words they remember. This takes much less time
2. Another alternative is to start the next item in the list with the last letter of the previous item. For example. I went to market and bought an apple, an elephant, some trees and a snake 
3. Add a rhythm. A model the rhythm by slapping your kness (gently) twice, clapping (twice) and then clicking the fingers on each hand in turn. Get all the children to take up the rhythm. Then say your own name on the first click and one of the children’s names on the second. The child then says their name on the first click and another child’s on the second, Once the rhythm has been established, introduce a word family, for example, fruit. The activity starts again, but this time you say a fruit with the first click and a name of a child with the second. For example, ‘Banana, Peter’. Peter then has to say, For example, ‘Apple, Justina’, and soon.

Reference
Crazy Animals and Other Activities for Teaching English to Young Learners

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