1. With Your Eyes Closed
It’s more fun to practice the Present Continuous, for example, when the student closes his or her eyes and tries to guess what another student or the teacher doing:
- Are you jumping?
- Are you opening the book?
- Are you making a phone call?
A similar activity can be done to practice Present Perfect:
- Have you just stood up/opened the door/taken my things?
2. Memory Game
It’s more exciting and effective to train your memory by trying to describe what people are doing in the picture, rather than practice the Present Continuous by simply describing the picture.
3. Board Games
Any grammar construction or vocabulary can be practiced by playing board games. For example, the student can’t move his or her counter until they make the correct sentence with a given construction or word.
Here’s the “Football Game”. The student’s aim is to reach the goal before the teacher who moves his or her counter by squares on the left with every student’s answer, while the student only moves if the answer is correct.
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4. Pelmanism
For this game you need a pack of card with pictures and a similar pack of cards with the matching definition of each picture in words. The cards are spread face down. Players take two cards in turns. Their aim is to find “a match” – a picture with its definition. If the player finds “a match”, he or she takes it; otherwise, the player puts them back trying to remember their position. The second player makes his or her move.
The winner is the one who picks more “matches”.
5. Flatmates
This activity is suitable for learning the vocabulary of personalities.
Who would or wouldn’t you choose as a flatmate? Describe his or her personality, and let others guess what his or her name is. While describing, don’t use the words written in the picture.
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6. Random Answers
This is a good activity to practise questions. One student is given about ten or a dozen questions which he or she reads to the other student (or to the teacher). The latter writes down the answers in random order. Then the first student has to remember the questions, by looking at the answers.
There might be some traps using very similar questions. For example: What food did you like most when you were a child? What food do you like most now?
7. Domino
I enjoy preparing such activities to practice collocations, word formation and what not 🙂
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8. Crosswords
They are easy to make, and are great for learning vocabulary. Here’s you can find the tool for making them.
9 – While the Sand is Pouring
To increase fluency, try telling a story while the sand in a small hourglass is pouring. It becomes even more exciting when the student has to tell the story 3 times, quicker and quicker each time if the teacher has a set of different hourglasses
10. “Find-the-Word” Spelling Tests
Spelling tests are a lot of fun when the pupil has to find the stickers with words attached to objects all around the classroom. The student has to find all the words and write them down in his or her notebook in a set time.