Awesome ESL and EAL Games and Warmers

Teaching English as a Foreign Language for five years in Thailand, I picked up some great ideas for games and warmers for language lessons. Here are some of my favorites…

Eternal Questions

This is a really easy creative writing warmer with almost no prep – you just need some scrap paper.

• Clear the tables and chairs.
• Hand out scraps of paper to each student.
• Ask them to write 2 interesting questions on their paper – give them 1-3 minutes.
• I tell them that they have to be interesting questions, not ‘What’s your name?’ or ‘How old are you?’.
• I always take part in the game and I make sure they can see me writing my questions down. I’ll share my questions after a minute or so.
• When everyone has finished, ask everyone to stand up.
• The game is played as follows:
  1. Find a partner.
  2. Ask them a question.
  3. Answer a question.
  4. Swap papers.
  5. Find a new partner.
  6. Repeat.
• I’ve found that you sometimes need to push the students to swap partners if they haven’t played before.

Eternal Questions is great because it involves all of the students, it gets them moving, it makes them talk to different students, and it forces them to ask new questions they might not be familiar with. I usually play it for about 10 minutes, but it can continue so long as students are still asking questions.

A cool variation is to ask the students to write the questions in the back of their notebooks. If you play this game repeatedly throughout the year, they’ll build up a bank of different questions that they’ll become confident using.

Another good variation is to specify different types of questions they must ask. In two examples below, I adapted the game to use four questions and asked students to think of questions that used a) different tenses and b) different pronouns. These were great for practicing tense consistency and subject-verb agreement.

Line Games

Most teachers will have used line games at some point, but this is how I play them:

• Clear the room of tables and chairs.
• Split the class into about 4 groups.
• Everyone stands up.
• Get each group to line up facing the front of the class, with the teacher right at the front, facing them.
• Only the student at the front of each line can answer a question.
• Students must put their hands up to answer (or it’s total chaos!).
• Ask the students a question (or display a question via PowerPoint).
• The student who answers correctly can sit down. The other students at the front must go to the back of the line.
• Repeat until all of the students in one line are sitting down – they are the winners.

I’d usually make a PowerPoint with the questions on and have rounds which get progressively more difficult. In the lesson below, I was teaching possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns. In each round, I had a series of slides that displayed either pronouns or adjectives. In round one, the students simply had to change pronouns to swap them.

In round two, they had to swap them and create sentences.

I also used a neat little Visual Basic Macro to randomize the slides so I could I could play the game for as long as I liked. I’ll write more about using Macros in PowerPoint later.

Of course, the PowerPoints require some prep time, so a great alternative is to use a set of question cards or simply come up with questions on-the-fly yourself. The latter is great for targetting a particular topic or grammar point.

Hot-seat

• Clear the tables from the room but keep the chairs.
• Put the students into small groups (4-6).
• For each group, arrange the chairs in a semi-circle with one chair facing all of the others.
• In each group, one student starts in the hot-seat.
• The other students take turns to ask a question, which the student in the hot-seat tries to answer. They can pass if they want to.
• After 2-3 minutes, stop the activity, change the student in the hot-seat, and repeat.
• Extension: Collect the whole class together and ask each group to tell the class what they’ve learned about a particular member of their group.
• Variation: Make the activity competitive by challenging the students to answer as many questions as they can. Award small prizes or participation points for the most questions answered.
• Variation: Assign one member of each group the role of ‘recorder’. They have to make notes about the answers they hear. The student performing this role could change after each round.
• Variation: Assign each group a different category e.g. past tense questions, present perfect questions, ‘about you’, ‘sport’.

What’s the Word?

• Put two chairs at the front of the class, with their backs to the board, facing the rest of the class.
• Split the class into 2 teams
• Choose 2 students to sit at the front.
• The teacher stands behind the 2 students at the front, facing the class.
• Show the class a word (written on a card or via PowerPoint).
• The teams describe the word to the students at the front.
  • The teams cannot say the word, mime it, use their first language, or make animal noises, etc.
  • The students trying to guess cannot turn around or speak.
  • I usually deduct a point if I catch them cheating.
• The students at front try to guess the word. They put their hand up when they know and tell the teacher. Their team gets a point if they’re correct.
• After a couple of turns, change the students who have to guess.

I usually play this game with PowerPoints. It takes about ten minutes to prepare the slides, but you don’t need very many (10-15 max.) and the students definitely enjoyed seeing pictures of their favorite pop stars and football players onscreen.

Musical Hot Potato

This is a great activity that I’ve used so many times in ESL classes. You just need a ball and some music.

• Clear the tables and chairs.
• Get the students to sit in a circle.
• Choose some music (or let the students choose it).
• Hold up the ball and ask ‘What is it?’. Keep saying ‘No’ as they guess things like ‘ball’, ‘sphere’, ‘green’, etc. Finally, tell them it’s a potato and it’s very hot. Tell them while the music is playing they must pass it around the circle or they’ll burn their hands… but they must not throw it.
• Give one student the potato.
• Play the music for a little while. The students pass the potato around the circle.
• Stop the music.
• The student holding the potato has to stand up and answer a question (either from the teacher or from the board) or ask another student a question.
• Repeat until lots of students have had a chance to speak.
• If you see someone throw the potato, stop the music and that student answers a question.
• Student often like to chatter during the quiet parts of the game instead of listening to the questions. Usually, I would make anyone talking answer a question as well. It’s also good to pick the chattering students to repeat the question or answer they should have been listening to.

Variation: Multi-potato

• Have two or three potatoes going around the group and the students holding the potatoes when the music stops talk to each other.

Variation: (No Yes, No No)

• Students must not answer questions using ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ – they have to answer in full sentences.

Usually, I will have prepared some PowerPoint slides with different questions I want the students to practice. I’ll have the slides showing while the music is playing so students can prepare their answers. To make it more difficult, I sometimes hide the slide when it’s time to answer. Sometimes, rather than having the actual questions, I have a slide showing the grammar structure they need to use.

Kahoot!

If you’re lucky enough to have a pc, a projector, and students with smartphones, then Kahoot! is an absolute winner, especially for revising vocabulary and practicing error correction. I’ll probably write a full post about it later, but here’s an overview:

• Sign up at kahoot.com.
• Create a kahoot or use one already created by the community. A standard kahoot is a multiple choice question. It looks a bit like a PowerPoint slide, with the choices listed at the bottom of the screen. The choices appear as colored squares on the students’ devices.

• Load the kahoot. A login screen displays with an entry pin.
• The students enter the pin and choose a username. The usernames appear onscreen.
• When everyone is in, start the kahoot.
• The teacher runs the kahoot, with students answering the questions on their devices. After each question, the correct answer and a breakdown of the answers students gave are displayed, followed by a leaderboard.
• After the final question, the final leaderboard is displayed.

I like to provide a commentary on the kahoot, praising the students if the majority were correct, and providing a quick review of the question if a significant number were wrong.

My Thai students loved playing kahoot – it’s easy to play, very colorful, and has fun accompanying music. I also liked it because designing kahoots is simple and quick and you can upload your own images… meaning you can practice the exact vocabulary pictures from your textbook or use images of their interests – my kahoots were full of Totoro, Exo, and Neymar!

If you’re looking for something a bit more challenging than kahoot’s multiple-choice questions, I’d suggest taking a look at socrative, another great education app. It allows different types of questions, including questions that require written answers.

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OK, that’s your lot for today! I’ll probably write a follow-up post with some more great ESL games and warmers later, and I can see posts on using Visual Basic with PowerPoint and the best education apps on the horizon too. If you’ve any questions on how to play these games, comment below, email me or twitter me.

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