Guessing Games Guessing Games are a fun way for beginners to review vocabulary words, practice forming structures, and listen for meaning.     Form & Meaning Activity: "Animal Habits" (from Grammar Practice Activities, p.256) Grammar: simple present to describe habitual action.   Procedure: For this activity students work in pairs or small groups to prepare a description of an animal. (For a longer activity have each group prepare 3-5 separate animal descriptions. Note that if you allow students to write out their descriptions, this becomes more like a focused practice activity.) Once students have prepared their descriptions, each group takes turns telling a description to the rest of the class, who then guess the name of the animal.   Example: A possible description of a rabbit could include, "It lives in a hole. It eats plants and vegetables. It has a lot of babies. It runs very fast."     Source: http://www.eslpartyland.com/teachers/grammar/Simplepresandprog.htm#Guessing%20Games January 19, 2005 Knots and Crosses (Tic Tac Toe) This game can be adapted to any material.  Simply draw a knots and crosses game on the board and fill in each space with a prompt related to the theme you are teaching.  Students must correctly form a sentence related to the prompt in order to claim the space for thier team.     For example, you might draw a clock in each space, and the students must say what they do at that time.       "I go to bed at ten o'clock".       Or, you might specify the activity in the square.  There are a million variations to this game that you can apply to whatever theme or grammatical point you are teaching. January 19, 2005 Using Colour to Teach Grammar   When you are teaching the children a new conversation/sentence and   don't want to get bogged down with grammatical explanation simply   write the new sentence in colours on the board.     For example...     Pronoun - Yellow     Verb - Red     Object - Green     Pronoun     Verb      Noun      I        like     tennis   (Yellow)    (Red)    (Green)     This activity helps those students who find it difficult to put simple   sentences together.     From: Eve Harrison   Source: http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/index.shtml   January 19, 2005 A short practise activity for Present Continuous Elementary +     To practise present continuous for something happening at the moment of speaking This only really works if you’re in a busy area! But if you are, after presenting the language, an really easy thing to do is get all your students standing up at the window, and getting them to take turns in describing what is happening, e.g. the builders are drinking coffee, the woman is walking the dog.   August 18, 2003 PRACTISING PASSIVES Here’s an idea for practising passives. I stick various pictures on the whiteboard and cut up short sentences, one for each picture, some active and some passive. The students have one or two each, which they match to the pictures. They then have a sheet with all the sentences on it and decide which are active and which are passive. In pairs they then try to convert the active sentences to passive ones and vice versa.   (e.g.   The baby has been put in his playpen.......The parents have put the baby in his playpen.   The milk will soon be drunk by the cat......The cat will soon drink the milk.)     Katherine Musson, Eastbourne, UK April 11, 2003 PERSONAL QUESTIONS! Rather than give students the biography of a famous person, you could write your own! Students always like to learn about their teacher, which adds a little more interest situation. Once you have written your biography, you leve out certain details, for example: “I was born in ………, UK, on ………….. My father’s name is …..” and so on.   The students then have to write the questions before asking you. Make sure you omit the right information to draw out the correct question form.   You could follow it up by asking your students to write a similar text about themselves, then swapping it with a partner.     Sam Shepherd, UK April 11, 2003 COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES My best idea for this is getting the students to do a survey to discover the best apple. I buy five apples with contrasting appearance and taste-   Granny Smiths (green with a fairly sharp taste and tough skin)   Golden delicious (yellow with a bland taste)   Braeburn or Royal Gala (red with a sweet taste)   Bramleys (green with and extremely bitter taste)   Cox’s orange pippins (mottled with a slightly drier taste)   Students use adjectives to describe the appearance of the apples (and comparatives and superlatives of these adjectives) and adjectives to describe the taste of a good apple (plus the opposites)   Then in groups they taste each apple and compare them with each other, completing a table with their opinions. They decide which apple they like best and then work with another student, who had the same opinion, to compose an advertisement for that apple.   (N.B. Don’t do this lesson just before lunch. Otherwise the students can’t wait to get to the tasting bit and the language section is seen as a waste of time!)     Katherine Musson, Eastbourne, UK April 11, 2003 PAST PERFECT RIDDLES Tell your students a riddle, making sure that the story is told in the past tense. The students then have to ask you questions using the past perfect to establish what had happened before the past situation happened. Every few questions, you might like to stop and summarise the information, again, using the past perfect. If your students know any riddles of their own, you could get them to tell their own. You can find riddles like this at: www.riddlesandjokes.com     Sam Shepherd, UK April 11, 2003 REPORTED SPEECH I put pictures of people on the whiteboard, either in couples or with a definite facial expression, and give out speech bubbles which the students match to the pictures. They then answer the question, "What did no. 1 say?" or "What did no. 3 tell her?" to encourage reporting the speech.     Katherine Musson, Eastbourne, UK April 11, 2003