[meganinjapan84]

Hello! I teach English at a YMCA in Japan. I teach children aged 6mo.-12yrs. I also teach a significant amount of adults. I have the childrens` lessons pretty well under control but it is coming up with games and activities for my adult classes that I am having trouble with. Please let me know if you have any ideas!

[davidsensei]

My forte is games for kindergarten classes, but 4 times a year my company has a company-wide training session and we play games there as icebreakers and team-building activities. Some of the ones that could probably be used in the classroom are those that require some mingling and interviews. You can assign everyone an animal and have everyone mingle and ask questions (what color are you? are you bigger than a ___? do you have a long nose? etc.). The only thing they can't ask is the direct question of "What animal are you?" Have a list of all the animals and the students can write down the name of the person next to the animal they were assigned. This is a good activity for working on descriptions.

Maybe if you could go more into detail about the level of the students and the number(s) of students in the class(es), you could get more applicable suggestions.

[meganinjapan84]

My class sizes range from 2-5 female students. Most of my classes are pretty well advanced but I am looking for ideas for my beginner class. There are two females. They can speak pretty good English but it's mostly broken sentences. I've been working on grammar but they are getting bored with just the lessons, so I'm looking for games and/or activities that keep them interested and allow them to practice.

[davidsensei]

For grammar, have you tried MadLibs? You can easily create your own. Just write a simple paragraph, and then take the various parts of speech found in there and replace them with blanks. Make a list of all the parts of speech needed, and have the students come up with appropriate words that fit those categories. Plug them into the original paragraph for a silly result. You may need to tweak it to fit their level (e.g. give them a list of possible words to plug in), but if their comprehension is good, that could be a fun activity.

[English-coach]

You could play trivial persuit, or taboo...TABOO is my fav.

[Chancho Matero]

we play pictionary...
or to guess the fruits by the taste,

[ckb_brown]

I teach level I ESL to spanish speakers. For part of each class, I use music and give them English/Spanish translations. We read the translations, listen to the song in English, then sing alog. They love it. So far, they've learned Beatles "Goodbye, Hello", "Yesterday", and Santana "Corazon Espinado."

[English-coach]

There is also a great book full of games for adults and it is broken into grammar points.

"Intermediate Grammar Games" Pearson Education Limited

Hope that helps.

[ordeal]

Hi!
I‘ve tried this and it worked really well. They in turns pick up four or five irregular verbs that are upside down on my desk and write them down on the board in the past and past participle forms. Then, as a warm up activity, they get into pairs and think of sentences using the verbs in any tense. Each pair says the sentences aloud. After that the whole group makes up a story adding one or two sentences to the previous one. What makes them laugh is the unexpected development and end of the story.

[ckb_brown]

get idea - thanks!