Play stations

PLAY STATIONS

This is an idea for the first day of class or just to have fun from time to time.
Students will play different games in small groups recycling vocab. and practising oral skills.

First of all you need to decide which games you want to use – below you have some suggestions and depending on the size of your group you’ll need to use more or less.

1) Taboo. Here you’ll need to prepare some cards with target words and 4 or 5 forbidden words. (There’s a template for this.)

2) Pictionary. Here you can use cards with words or sentences written on them. You’ll need to supply rough paper and a pencil.

3) 20 questions. I’ve used pictures of different jobs. Students have to ask a maximum of 20 yes/no questions to try and guess the job. You could also use famous people or objects.

4) Half crosswords. You’ll need two half crosswords for students to work in pairs to write clues to the words filled in on their half of the crossword. There are some of these in the English File Resource books.

5) Tell your group about… This is a board game which I think comes from one of the Reward resource books. You’ll need to supply one counter and a coin for students to throw as a dice.

6) Do you….? These are question cards which students use to take it in turns to ask each other personal questions – I think these came from English File intermediate resource book.


Setting up the class:
The idea is to set up “play stations” around the room – you’ll need to put the instructions and the items necessary for each game – in different corners / areas of the classroom.
The ideal number of students per group is 4, but this obviously depends on the size of your group.
Allot each group to a play station and tell them to read the instructions carefully – if they have any questions they can ask you for clarification and you’ll need to monitor to check that they are playing correctly! Give them about 8-10 minutes on the first activity. When the time’s up tell them to stop and move clockwise around the room to the next play station and continue the process until all play stations have been visited.

Students' instructions will follow in the next entry as they don't fit here! BTW there's no way of attaching word documents here is there?