Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, ELL, elt, energizers, esl, fast finishers, fillers, Fillers and First Week Activities, follow up, fun, fun activities, games, gamification, gapfillers, grammar games, group work, ice-breakers, ideas, inspiration, lesson idea, lesson ideas, lessons for teachers, warm-ups, warmers, writing a story, writing games

Roll a Dice

You feel tired and have no energy to plan a lesson for tomorrow,
Your students have been too fast to finish the tasks you planned for this lesson,
You see they sulk, they feel bored or tired and can’t understand the lesson,
then why not roll a dice and let the fun begin.
What can you do with a dice?
There are wonderful no-prep activities to liven up your class, to motivate your students to speak or even to write. Here are some activities you may want to use whenever you feel the need:
1. The student rolls the dice and tells things aboult herself according to the number on the dice. If the number is three, for instance, she must say three interesting facts about herself.
2. Write what each number is for (from 1 to 6) on the board. Such as, 1 something you’ve done so far today; 2 something you want to buy this year, etc and the students roll the dice in turns and talk about themselves.
3. Dictate them an opening sentence for a story. Tell them you’ll throw the dice and they have to continue to write the story. The dice will decide the number of sentences they’ll write. If the number on the dice is 4, they will write four sentences. Then dictate them another sentence, tell them they can change the subject but they have to fit the sentence into their story. Then roll the dice again and students continue to write. Roll the dice for the last time and tell students to finish their stories.
4. Ask students to write questions on cards. Put the pile of the cards in the middle of the desk. Roll the dice. The students must answer questions according to the number on the dice in turns.
5. Divide students into 6. Give each team a number from 1-6 and a topic such as travel, school, celebrations and then tell them to write questions on their topics on small slips of papers or cards. When the questions are ready, ask them to roll the dice and answer the questions in turns. If 1 is travel and they’ve rolled 1, then they will choose a question from that pile.
6. Assign a task for each number 1: draw the word, 2: use the word in a sentence, 3: define the word, 4: spell the word, 5: give a synonym, antonym or a derivative of the word, 6: ask a question using the word.

An the list goes on….
Hope these will help.

Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, creative tasks, creativity, efl, ELL, elt, esl, exercises, fun, fun activities, games, online games, pair work

Looking at Digital Games and Heroes

image taken from yahoo images
image taken from yahoo images

 

I am not a fan of online games. I don’t play any but my son spends most of his free time playing online games. I have lots of students who do the same and when the subject is online games, even the quietest one starts to speak. A few years ago I had three students in my class. They were very much interested in games. They were very interesting boys because they were not ordinary players as they learned a lot about mythology and literature playing these games. One of them is writing stories and probably he’ll become a famous writer one day. That’s my hope for him.

I was clearing my files during the break and I came across a handout I coped from a book (unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the book) on literature. There were questions about favourite titles and characters. I put the handout among the ones I’d like to use this year but then suddenly I thought about another activity. Why shouldn’t I adapt it to games that the students are fond of playing and would work on the activity eagerly?

So here are my questions. I’ll be very happy if you can suggest other questions for this activity.

Think about the online games you love playing. First finish the sentences then compare your answers with your partner.

  1. I think I’m like the character ————————– from the game ———— because ———————-.
  2. I like the title of the game ————————— because ———————-.
  3. The game which I find very challenging is ———————————.
  4. I want to meet the character ———————- from the game —————- because ————————-
  5. The character whose action I admire is ————————– because ——-
  6. For me the most interesting 3 online games are ———————————.
  7. It is easy to win a game in ————————– because ———————–
  8. It is difficult to win a game in ———————– because ———————-.
  9. The game ——————- is set in a ——————————. It is —————–.
  10. 10. In the game ———————— you need to be a team to win.

Here you can find the handout I prepared for the activity.

Links to some blogs and interesting posts on online games

 

 

Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, dialogue, efl, fun, fun activities, ice-breakers, lesson ideas, vocabulary, writing games

5 Fun Activities For the Monday Morning

 

Slide1

1. Categories

Divide the class into two.

Explain the rules. You will give the students a category.

Call 2 students from each team to the board.

Set 2 minutes and tell them to write the words that come to their mind.

Some categories:

Things in a fridge

Things you can buy from a supermarket

Expensive items

Things you can find in a living room.

Adjectives that describe personality.

2. Right Word, Wrong Place

Prepare a handout with newly learned structures or some quotes on the topic you’d like to discuss in the class.

Make grammatically incorrect sentences changing the place of two words in the sentence and ask students to correct them.

3. Catch the words

Draw a circle and write some letters with which students form words. Prepare a handout jumbling the words you’ve recently studied in the class.

4. Dialogues

On slips of papers, write sentences or ask students to write sentences.

Put the students in pairs.

Give each pair 4 slips of papers, preferably the same 4 sentences and tell them to write a dialogue and insert the sentences they have on the slips of papers into their dialogues.

5. Comprehension Questions

Write the topic of the reading passage/listening activity on the board.

Tell students to copy it on a piece of paper and then write a question about it.

Then pass the paper to their friend and ask them to write another question. Then tell them to pass it to the next student. When each student receive their own papers, ask them to read the text and try to find if any of the questions are answered.

Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, FlipQuiz, games, web 2.0

FlipQuiz

We love playing games in the class and quiz-show type games are very popular in our classrooms. We have the PowerPoint format of most games but if we want to change certain things on them to adapt the game for our own needs, we spend long hours and sometimes we give up. I’ve just come across with a very handy way to create my own games.

FlipQuiz 

First of all it’s free and very easy to use. All you have to do is to sign up and go to your dashboard. You will see two buttons at the top. Click on the green one and start creating your board. You will be able to create 6 categories and for each category you can add 5 questions. You can either add the answers or leave it blank. Then click on save and share the link with your students. I’m planning to revise Conditionals in the class with FlipQuiz

 

FlipQuiz

I think FlipQuiz can be used in a language classroom effectively. I will use it

1. with readers, novels and short stories, reading texts to check comprehension

2. to revise grammar

3. to revise vocabulary

4. just for fun ( as who wants to be a millionaire)

 

Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, blog challenge, efl, fun activities, games, novels, readers, reading, reading comprehension, short stories

Reading Games for Readers, Novels or Short Stories

Reading

image from #eltpics via @mkofab

In December, I had the chance to listen to Steven Krashen at YTU ELT symposium. He talked about the importance of reading, how he became a good reader and what narrow reading is. You can read Marisa Constantinides’ fabulous post on Dr Krashen’s talk here.

That was the time I went back to the past and thought how I became a reader. I did the narrow reading. There was a time in my life, I read Enid Blyton novels, then came the French classics and the Russians, I fell in love with Sartre, Camus and their contemporaries, then came the Italian novelists and the South Americans and of course there was a time I only read British novelists. There was a time I read poetry only -Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, Zahrad.

I was lucky to have two primary school teachers who led me to the paths of reading so I want to follow their footsteps. I believe teachers can help students become good readers. That’s why I think about fun activities to go with reading lessons.

Here you will find some activities that I use with my classes.

1. Tic-tac-toe

Write questions from the story or novel on slips of papers or post-it-notes and number them from 1-9. (Prepare double or triple questions for each number as students may not answer the questions)

Put in an envelope or a box or stick the papers on a ‘tic-tac-toe’ grid.

Team your students as Xs and Os.

Draw a tic-tac-toe grid on the board and tell them to choose a number. Take the numbered post-it from your tic-tac-toe handout. If they answer the question correctly, cross the number with X or O.

Continue until the questions finish.

1

 

 

 2 3

4

 

 

 5 6

7

 

 

 8 9

2. Who Wants to be a Billionaire?

Play the game with questions from the novel or the story you read in the class.

3. Who said that?

Choose quotes or sentences from the novel

Divide the class into two teams.

Ask students “Who said that?”

4. Snowball fights

Tell students to write questions or quotes from the novel or the story on a piece of paper.

Tell them to make a paper snowball and allow them to play snowball fights for a while.

Stop them

Tell them to take the closest snowball and answer the questions.

You can guide them to ask their questions according to Bloom’s Taxonomy using http://teachers.ash.org.au/researchskills/dalton.htm#top

Now I’d like you to invite my first ever blog challenge 🙂

Would you like to share some of your favorite reading activities on your blog?

If you don’t blog, I’d be very happy to host your post on this blog.