TeachingEnglish | Activities

Text A Game: Angry Cat This is a speaking game for any number of players. Players sit in a circle and take turns in speaking. The first player says Ive got an angry cat. The second player thinks of an adjective beginning with b and says Ive got an angry, (eg beautiful) cat. The game continues in this way with players taking turns to speak. Each player repeats the previous sentence and adds a new adjective (in alphabetical order). If a player makes a mistake or cannot think of a new adjective, he/she is out. The game continues until only one player (the winner) remains.

Text B Game: Categories This is a writing game for any number of players. Appoint a leader. Players draw a table with five or six columns/categories, eg: food sport transport animal clothes

The leader chooses a letter, eg: C. Players write a word in each column, beginning with the letter, eg: cheese, cricket, car, cow, cardigan The leader awards points for each answer: a correct answer = 1 point, an original answer (that no other player has) = 3 points. The game continues with new letters. The player with most points wins. Note: categories can be easy (as above) or more challenging (eg: adverbs, prepositions, phrasal verbs, etc.)

www.teachingenglish.org.uk BBC | British Council 2010

TeachingEnglish | Activities

Text C Game: Disappearing sentence This is a team game for any number of teams. Appoint a leader and make teams of 2-4 players. Write a long, complicated sentence on the board or on a piece of paper. (Eg: The beautiful blonde actress, Jane Miles, looked up suddenly towards the top-floor balcony of her daughters mansion, just in time to see her favourite five-year-old grandson, Benny, leaning dangerously over the iron railings, waving frantically and about to fall!) Teams take turns to delete 1, 2 or 3 consecutive words from the sentence. The remaining sentence must continue to make grammatical sense. (Punctuation can be changed.) The last team able to delete words is the winning team.

Text D Game: Buzz This is a number game for any number of players. Players sit in a circle and take turns to speak. The first player starts by saying one. The second player (in a clockwise direction) says two. The game continues in this way, with players taking turns to count. Players cannot say the number seven or any number containing seven or multiples of seven (eg: they cannot say seventeen, twenty-one, etc.), instead, they have to say buzz! When a player says buzz! The game continues but players change direction (anticlockwise). When a player makes a mistake he/she is out. The game continues until only one player (the winner) remains.

www.teachingenglish.org.uk BBC | British Council 2010