Interesting classroom activities

[Dqueen]

Hello everyone,

I am supposed to make a presentation to my colleagues on interesting classroom activities. I am in urgent need of some ideas. My main activity is using madlibs, but I need more. By the way, I live in Turkey and teach English as a second language. I teach primary school kids but the ideas can also be applicable to middle school students. I want to introduce different games or activities other teachers can play with their students when they teach grammar and the four skills. It would be very nice if these activities are not much heard of. Thanks already.

[patsensei]

Have you ever tried "running dictation"? what you do is you make about 8 sentences and you cut them up and tape them up around the room. then you make the class into pairs. So one student runs and looks at the sentence taped up around the room and tells the other student who writes down the sentence.
It's a good activity because it uses both writing, reading listening and speaking. Hope that helps.


http://www.teachjapanforum.com

[ForumAngel]

Here's a really fun review activity that the kids love. This exact example was given to me by one of my customers who is using and adapting my games:

Have your pupils start about 4 feet from their "a/an" worksheet. Have three rows with 16 words in each row. On the desk where the children start they have a piece of lined paper. Have pencils at both ends so that they aren't running with them. The words in the list should be words you have already introduced and had some speaking practise with.

On "Go" the pupils run from their desk to the worksheet and write the appropriate "a" or "an" in front of the word. They then run back to their respective desks and write it out in full. For example if they put down "an" in front of egg, then they run back and write, "an egg". The fastest person with the highest accuracy is the winner.
Of course you can play down the competitive element, and with 4-5 year olds make sure that everyone wins. Competition is a whole different subject anyway.

This idea can be adapted to all sorts of writing ideas – spelling, fill in the blanks, verb endings…anything as long as it does not involve writing out long sentences.

While the idea is best for beginners to lower intermediates, you could probably use it now and again with an advanced class just to drill in a particular target structure, or to work with some words which you notice are frequently wrong.

Kind regards,
Shelley
Receive free games and ideas to make teaching children more fun on: http://www.teachingenglishgames.com

[jonnielsen]

I have just remembered some activities we used to do at the American Language School. When one of the students says a word, the one next to him/her must say another word that starts with the final letter of the word said by his/her classmate. It was a real fun! It also helped us with spelling. We were not allowed to write the words. We had to imagine the spelling in next to no time. The teacher used to give us tongue twisters and asked us to practice them to improve our pronunciation, too. He also used to give us some letters and asked us to form as much words as possible using them. The reason behind this activity was to teach us that using a method always helps. Because we did not follow any method and we were doing it at random. I hope these activities will help you.

[philip]

Classrooms are the basic creation of every students and their whole life. So in the academic life the students can make more funs and hobbies to reduce the academic stress. There have a lot of class room activities. The Favorite Hobbies among Students includes Writing,photographing,stampcollection,reading etc. Writing and reading is the important hobbies that will get the best creativity and it helps to improve the thinking ability of a student.