It’s no secret that Vietnamese people love playing games. Whether it’s old men playing Chinese Chess over a refreshing cup of ‘Tra Da’ or the younger generation who are in love with anything online. When learning English it’s no different, expand your ESL game repertoire with some of our favourites.
Games for kindergarteners:
Bowling! (Requires ball and flashcards) Set up the pins of flashcards with your target vocabulary on them. Whichever target the ball hits the student must read out.
Erase the word/picture: Write/draw a selection of vocabulary on the board, give students a board eraser and call out vocabulary one at a time. Students must race/rush to clear them.
One Jump, Two Hops: A simple variant on many childhood games. Choose one student to stand facing a wall. The other students are standing next to each other on a line. The students must shout ‘how many?’, the student facing the wall must reply ‘2 steps’ or ‘1 jump’ or ‘3 hops’ or ‘6 skips’ etc. Then the kids must all take that many steps/jumps/skips/hops/crawls towards him. When they are really close to him and ask ‘how many?’ he shouts ‘zero’ and chases them back to their starting point. If he catches one, that person is up next. We suggest starting the first week just with steps. Then the next week offer steps and jumps. Then slowly add more common movement verbs until you’ve expanded their vocabulary in a fun way.
Whilst games are great, kindergarteners love singing. We recommend searching on YouTube for ‘Super Simple Songs’- they’re great. Also google search for ‘Dream English’ for a lovely selection of songs from ‘Teacher Matt’.
Games for 5-8 year olds:
Blindfolded Maze: This game takes a little preparation and can’t be done every class but it’s a great treat for the kids. Set up a little (safe) maze from objects around the class. Students take turns being blindfolded and directed around the maze by their classmates (make sure they know ‘left, right, stop, back, walk!)
Spin and Draw: Simple and fun. Split the class into 2 teams. One student from each team gets spun around and a piece of vocabulary gets shouted. Each student must dizzily take a board marker and run to the board to run/draw it.
Whisper Race: Have students split into two teams, stand students one after another in 2 parallel lines. Whisper a word to one of them, he must whisper it forward to the next student and so on until the front. The student at the front runs to the board when he has heard the word, and writes it down. If he is correct and he beats the player from the other team then his team can get one point. You can vary the difficulty by doing this one letter at a time.
Also some great classics not to forget: Simon Says! + Grandmother’s Footsteps/What’s the time Mr Wolf
Games for 9-15 year olds:
One Sentence Story: If you’re students are reasonably advanced try a ‘one sentence story’. Give students a starting point ‘One day Charlie was in the park’, the next student must continue this story with his own sentence, and so on and so on.
Mime Games: Show a student or two an action written on a piece of paper, this could be as simple as ‘jump’ or as complicated as ‘drinking hot coffee on a shaky train’, it depends on your students. The first student/team to guess the action gets a point. You might need to be a bit fearless with this one to show students there is nothing to be shy about.
Also some great classics not to forget: Hangman and the not to be missed ESL classic ‘Hot Seat’.
Games for Lower Level Adults:
There is no reason that games for younger students, can’t be played with adults. It won’t even take much convincing to get a class of Vietnamese adult students to start singing!
Pictionary: Some adults might be a bit shy about miming, so instead of making them feel embarrassed get them to draw the items instead of write them. It’s a lot of fun and can be done in teams to make it more competitive and engaging.
Also some great classics not to forget: ‘Find Someone Who’ and ‘Spelling Competitions’
Games for Higher Level Adults:
Legs: Randomly choose a letter, for example ‘c’, students have 3 minutes to think of as many words beginning with that letter as possible. One rule, it only counts if they have legs for example: ‘cat, cougar, chiropractor, chair’.
Also some great ESL classics: ‘Alibi’ and ‘Charades’
Written by Alex Sinclair Lack for Teacher’s Friend – Vietnam. All rights reserved.
