10 Fun Spelling Games for Your ESL Class

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Spelling Bee What are the different ways to play the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee? There are two different ways to play. In the Tournament Spelling Bee, you'll be challenged by a series of words, with the spelling difficulty adapted to your skill level. 12 ways of creating stories with your EFL students I’ve been reading a fair amount recently about the value of storytelling – and, in particular, the telling of vivid and emotionally-engaging stories – to memory in general, and vocabulary-learning and grammar practice more specifically. It certainly seems that learning new words from a list is a duller and less efficient alternative to acquiring and retaining new vocabulary than involving your learners in narratives using the target words. With this in mind, here are four ways you can involve your learners in creating stories around particular lexical or grammatical themes, and a list (and brief descriptions!) of eight other methods from various corners of this site:

Synonym Card Game There are 30 pairs of synonyms here (for a total of 60 cards) that can be used to play the games Fish and Memory. Students have to find the synonym card to the one that they have. The synonym pairs covered here are: large/big, tiny/small, noisy/loud, silent/quiet, quick/fast, sick/ill, leap/jump, push/shove, pull/tug, sprint/run, afraid/scared, spooky/scary, cold/chilly, home/house, rock/stone, garbage/trash, rug/carpet, kid/child, clever/smart, happy/glad, street/road, and throw/toss. You can use the game Fish or memory to practice this game. Fish goes likes this:

Games Crossword GameJust like an old-fashioned word search! Using the mouse and the wordlist, find and highlight the hidden English words in the box! As the levels get harder, the words start appearing in different orientations. But hurry, the clock is running! Beginning the School Year: It’s About Connections Not Content Most classes, starting with about middle school, begin the school year with reviewing the content to be covered, expectations regarding grades, and other academic information provided by the teacher or instructor. The human or social element is often disregarded. What is interesting is that most learners enter the classroom wondering who is in the course.

Crossword Puzzle Games - Create Puzzles Create A Crossword Puzzle Enter up to 20 words and hints (clues) below to create your own puzzles. There's no need to use all 20 words, you could use as little as two. Hints can be left blank. Word Scramble Maker Enter words in the box below. A maximum of 32 words will fit on one page. To make it easier, use a capital first letter. To make it harder, use all CAPS or all lower-case.Step 1. Elimination games with young learners ♫ One potato, two potatoes… ♫ Many of us remember playing elimination games like Musical Chairs and Simon Says when we were young. These are games where you start with a group, and each round, one or more players is “out” and eliminated from the game. As you get closer and closer to the end of the game, the tension builds, and it can be a lot of fun (and beneficial for young learners). However, for some very young learners, these kinds of elimination games can be very upsetting.

Teaching Empathy Through Digital Game Play Digital Tools Quandary The playful approach to learning a new concept that kids usually take when playing a video game can be just the right jumping-off point for diving deeply into a topic. Games can’t do all the teaching, but can engage kids to start thinking. At least that’s how MIT’s Education Arcade and the Learning Games Network are approaching their new free game Quandary. The two groups designed the video game to teach ethics while aligning with Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts for third through eighth graders. Finding the game-like challenge!* *With minimal preparation involved… Following a recent Friday workshop on teaching teenagers, in which, amongst other things, we discussed the difference between playing games for the sake of playing games and adding a game-like challenge into the activities we do in class, I have been thinking about different ways we can do this, without spending heaps of extra time on preparation. Here are some of the ideas I’ve come up with: 1. Board it and collaborate Instead of (or as well as/before) having learners complete a table in their books, individually, why not put them in teams, put the table on the board and get them to race to complete the table accurately: Linking words with teenagers

First Class Ice Breakers Using Mobile Devices I previously wrote about the importance of beginning a class focusing on the learners in the room as opposed to the content to be covered in Beginning the School Year: It’s About Connections Not Content. Most classes, starting with about middle school, begin the school year with reviewing the content to be covered, expectations regarding grades, and other academic information provided by the teacher or instructor. The human or social element is often disregarded.What is interesting is that most learners enter the classroom wondering who is in the course. They want to know about the teacher and the people in the class not what material is to be covered.

Quizlet for learners: a step-by-step guide Quizlet is a website that enables anybody who wishes to learn anything to make flashcards related to that topic. In the case of English language learners, it is a very useful tool for learning and revising vocabulary. Using Quizlet, learners can make their own sets of flashcards, then use these flashcards in various modes for studying, testing themselves and playing games to improve their recall of the vocabulary. I have just finished making a step-by-step guide to Quizlet, so that my learners can try using it themselves at home. My materials contain step-by-step instructions and screenshots, showing learners how to:

Proof It! - A Fun Proofreading Game at Portland Proof Begin Game! proof-it The speaker called out, "/Ladys/Ladies/, choose your partner for the next dance!"!@#$@!$%^%$All of my /freinds/friends/ think that I have strange ideas about politics.!