Fun Vocabulary Activities

It´s always a real problem getting students to remember and then recall vocabulary, isn´t it? What is the trick? Well, your activities need to be memorable! Here are a couple of fun activities which work on clothes vocabulary and will appeal to your kinesthetic, visual and linguistic students.

1. Statues
Recap clothes vocabulary. Ask ss to stand up and move round the room. When you give a signal, they stand back to back with a partner. Then they try to remember what the other student is wearing.

2. You Have Changed
Divide ss into groups of 4- 6. Each group is to study the other groups. Ask them all to turn away and make some changes to their appearance, eg. exchanging pullovers, changing a watch from one wrist to another, removing rings, etc. They present themselves to the other group who has to point out as many changes as possible.

3. Spelling Game
Divide the class into teams. Each team takes it in turns to add a letter to a word and each letter must contribute to a word in English related (in this case) to clothing, BUT the team which completes the word loses and the opposing team is awarded a point.
Eg. Team A says H. Team B says A. Team A says T.. Therefore team A loses as they have completed the word HAT!

(Not) Personal Questions!

This is one of my favourite activities to practise question forming- but not the usual "What´s your name'" stuff, which we all get fed up with, don´t we!

It´s called Fruit and Veg.

Ask ss to write down the following words on a scrap of paper, keeping them secret from their peers:

the name of a fruit
the name of a vegetable
a number between 1 and 200.
the answer to this question: do you like football?
How many pens and pencils do you have?
What is the first thing you do every morning?

Now tell them that these things are actually:
their first name
their family name
their age
are they married?
how many children they have?
their job.

Now they must get up and go round the class, asking the personal questions and sharing info about their new selves.

Guaranteed hilarity!

Fun Activity: The Soap Opera

Looking for a fun activity to practice adjectives to describe personality and appearance? Or to develop students´ writing in a creative AND FUN way? Try this! It´s one of my favourite activities! It works very well with adult students (EOI, for example) - I recommend selecting a range of pictures for the students so they can relate to the characters and choose the photos they prefer.

The soap opera

If you like this activity, go to: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/ - you will find lots of great ideas for teaching, plus some good articles on aspects of methodology, etc.