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.