Hot Seat
In this game, the club is split up into two teams. One member from each team sits facing the group. The leader holds up a word (or writes it on the board if you are in a classroom) for all of the team members to see except for the two players in the hot seats. The teams must try to get the person in the hot seat to guess the word or phrase. The first person to guess correctly gets to stand up and a new member from their team takes the hot seat. The person on the other team has to remain in the hot seat until she gets an answer first. You can keep score or just play for fun. This game can also be played in pairs. One pair member closes their eyes while the leader shows the word to the other pair members. The first pair to get the word right gets a point. Warning! This is a loud game because people tend to get excited and yell!
Broken Telephone
This is a listening and pronunciation activity that always gets people laughing. The leader first must think of a sentence or phrase and whisper it to the person beside her. That person will then whisper what she heard to the next person. Each person can only say, «Can you please repeat that?» one time. When the message reaches the end of the chain that person must speak out loud. Oftentimes the message will be completely different when it reaches the end. Try to find out where the chain broke! In a big group, you can send the message two ways and find out which team comes closest to the real message. (A famous example is the army message that started as «Send reinforcements, were going to advance» and ended as «Send three and fourpence, were going to a dance.»)
Find Pikachu
The idea of this activity is simple: students go around the school to hunt for Pokémons trapped in the QR world! Each QR code contains a Pokémon with varying points depending on its level or tier, and a corresponding question or task. Of course, students must be able to answer the question, or do the task successfully in order to earn the points of the Pokémon they had caught!
Create a separate code with game rules that students scan before they go outside.
Pictures
Another activity is by showing your learners some very close-up pictures you took with your smartphone. This can be done very quickly by going into your staffroom or looking around your desk and taking very, very close-up pictures of different objects, showing them to the students and trying to get them to guess what they are. You can display these pictures on the class projector in your our classroom or you can send them to the students if they have mobile phones with an Internet connection and they can access them through email. A follow-up to this, assuming you have the time, is that you can get the students to do this themselves. They can go for a few minutes around the school with a partner and take some pictures of things close up and then show them to the other members of the group. Alternatively, they could do this before they come to class and send them to the class.
Word clouds
An engaging way to revise a text and the accompanying vocabulary that you have recently looked at in class is to create a word cloud and then getting students to look at the word cloud to try to reconstruct the text. These word clouds generally emphasize keywords and will make words that appear more frequently bigger. This helps students because they were able to identify repeating ideas or common themes in the text and this helps them to reconstruct
it. To create a word cloud, you can go to popular websites such as Wordle or Tagxedo. This can be printed out from the website or you can just show on the board. A quick online quiz
A quick online quiz can be a great way to start a lesson and there are loads of websites out there for creating them. The one I tend to use most is Socrative simply because its so easy to use both for the teachers and the students. The teacher does have to register to make a quiz but its a fairly painless procedure. You can build multiple-choice or short-answer quizzes, and these can easily be made available to the students by them going to a particular webpage on either a computer or their mobile phone (there is also a mobile app) and just typing in a room number that the teacher assigns. They can then take the quiz and get instant feedback on their answers. As a teacher, you can display the progress of the students on the board and you can control whether the students go at their own pace or a pace you decide. Again this is quite nice the checking recent vocabulary Grammar or anything else you want to revise or recycle from your lessons.