Vocabulary Games and Warmers

There are lots of games that can be used for vocabulary practice and revision. Here are those which I usually use in the classroom.

• The teacher begins to draw something, the students guess what it is. It can be practiced in pairs.

• The teacher hides a picture card behind a sheet of paper, and begins to draw it out slowly. The students guess what it is. You can also use a piece of paper with a little hole for this purpose.

• Snowball Game: the teacher starts: ‘I want to go shopping and buy some apples’, the first student: ‘I want to go shopping and buy some apples and oranges’, the third adds one more to the list, and so on. The student who stumbles is out of the game. The winner is the last student left. This game can be used for revision of almost any topical vocabulary.

• I Spy: The teacher says:  I spy with my little eye/ I hear with my little ear something that begins with ‘s’. The students guess what it is. The student to have guessed the word correctly, thinks of another word. It’s great for practicing classroom vocabulary. It can also be used with any set of picture cards.

• Key-Jug Language: This activity is aimed at secondary students. One student thinks of a word and spells it, but in an unusual way. After each letter he says key, and, after the last letter, key-jug. Thus, the word plane will be presented as p-key, l-key, a-key, n-key, e-key jug. The rest of the class guesses. It can be a team game.

• Standing Dictation: All the students stand up, the teacher says a word in Russian or shows a picture card to each of the student, the one who can’t translate or name it, sits down. The winner is the student who is standing while the others have sat down.

Of many of the games I use at my lessons I learnt from the Way Ahead (Macmillan) and I Spy (Oxford) textbooks.

Multi-Sensory Vocabulary Activization

As we have seen in one of the previous posts, multi-sensory approach allows a teacher to introduce the new vocabulary in a meaningful way without resorting to the native language. Now I am going to speak about the tasks that are used for activating the vocabulary in the multi-sensory way.

I give my children picture cards or word cards, and give commands, such as Raise the bear! Bring me the star! Put the plane on your head!. This way my kids revise the vocabulary and move at the same time.

I have a bag, where I put little toys of, e.g. animals. Children their hands, grope for the toys, name the animal they are holding, and take it out to check.

With their eyes closed, kids try different fruit and name them.

I show my students a wordcard, they mime it (I ask the group not to say it aloud). If they mime it successfully, it means they understand the written word. If not – they look at their peers and remember.

Mushroom picking – I hide some picture or word cards around the room. The students are in teams, and they start looking for them. When they find a card, they name it or read it out. The team with the greater number of cards wins.

Matching: students come to the blackboard one by one and match pictures to words or words to pictures.

And, the best vocabulary game ever: Bingo! I use it very often. Students go through the vocabulary that needs to be revised, then they write out any 6 items from the list. Then I name the vocabulary items randomly. When the students hear a word they have written out, they cross it out. The one to be the first to cross all of them out is the winner!

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