The Wheel Of Fortune

Vocabulary

Revising vocabulary. Very useful to revise vocabulary either as a whole class, in pairs or in
competitions. Students will need to either explain the meaning of a word or use it in context.
Nobody will ever accuse you of favouring a team and there are countless options when working
with vocabulary. Example irregular verbs, phrasal verbs, phonemic transcription…etc

Another possibility to explore would be feeding the wheel with different topics and asking
students to write or say as many words related to the topic as possible in one minute. Some easy
topics could be: jobs, shops, nationalities, animals, food…etc.

Speaking

Three minutes. Feed the wheel with different topics you want students to talk about and ask
students to work in pairs and spin the wheel. They’ll have to talk about the topic for about three
minutes. Great to revise for oral exams!

Hot seat. Again feed the wheel with different topics you want students to talk about and divide
the class into teams and ask a student from Team A to sit in the “hot seat”. Spin the wheel.
Members of the other team need to ask him questions about the selected topic; he’ll need to talk
for about three minutes answering the other team’s questions but his answers cannot contain the
words YES or NO.

Comparing. Do you want students to compare? Feed the wheel accordingly: compare living in the
countryside/city, travelling by bus/plane, working as a teacher/shop assistant…etc

Writing

Storytelling. Give students an inspiring story starter and feed the wheel with prompts they need
to incorporate in their story. Spin the wheel and give students a minute to use the prompts in their
stories. Spin the wheel as many times as you deem appropriate. Display on the walls of the class
the stories for everybody to read.

Using connectors. Feed the wheel with different connectors (and, but however, although,…etc).
Ask students to work in pairs. On the board, write three sentences and ask students to choose
one. Tell them this sentence will be the first in their stories. Spin the wheel and display the first
connector they need to use. Spin the wheel as many times as you deem appropriate. Display on
the walls of the class the stories for everybody to read.

Dependent prepositions: feed the wheel with verbs such as depend, rely, insist…etc and ask
students to write a sentence using the verb together with its dependent preposition.
Order of adjectives. Are you teaching the order of adjectives before the noun? Feed the wheel
with nouns and ask the students to write a sentence containing the noun modified by two or three
adjectives.

Verbs followed by infinitive/gerund. Are you teaching/learning verbs followed by infinitive or

gerund? Rotate the wheel and ask students to write a short sentence containing the verb
randomly chosen.

I’m sure you have some more ideas to use this classroom tool, which is free and embeddable.
Have fun while learning, have fun while teaching.