[kidsesl]

I found this great chair switch game so I decided to share it with you all.

The fruit basket is a fun active game for learning new vocab with involves plenty of moment. It's great for students of any age or level, and even better for those students who can't stay still for long.





If you're working in Japan, all you have to do is say the word "furuba" and the students will already know what to do. For everyone else, here is a useful guide on how to play this great game.


Materials: Chairs and small cards with pictures on them.
Age: 4+

Class size: 8+

You begin the game by getting the students to put their chairs in a circle.




You then assign them different fruits such as banana, apple, orange, cherry, but make sure that there are at least three students with the same fruit. It can be a little hard for small children to remember what fruit they are in English, so it's best to hand out small cards with the picture of the fruit on them to help smaller children remember. I usually pull all my clip art from this website Clipart - High Quality, Easy to Use, Free Support

You can just copy and paste the images into a word document, photocopy it, and then cut the cards and distribute them among your students.

You can them demonstrate the game to your students by standing in the middle and calling out a fruit such as "apple" all the students with the apple card must stand up and switch chairs.The student who fails to get a chair, then going to the middle, calls out a fruit, and the game repeats itself. You may have to fake that you are really slow a few times until the students understand the game and feel confident being in the middle.





You can also call out two fruits at once, such as "apples and oranges." If the student in the middle calls out "fruit basket" all students must stand up and switch their chairs. Many students may just move to the next chair, so you can make a rule saying that they should move at least one two chairs away.

In most versions of the game if you end up in the center three times you are eaten by a monster (A.K.A the teacher) or forced to sing an English song they have learnt. I also played this game with a teacher who made her first grade students write their name in the air using their bum which was also super cute.

It’s probably best to play this game with children who are all about the same age. I once played this game with a bunch of kindergarten children aged 3-6 at a party and all the older children quickly changed chairs and then same small three year old child was left in the middle. I had to hold his hand and help him to find a chair.

Variations

The great thing about this game is that you can play it with any vocab word such as foods, animals or shopping. I recently created my own Career Basket where the children had cards with pictures of different occupations. The children in the circle asked “What do you want to be?” and the child in the middle replied “I want to be doctor/ scientist/ nurse/ fisherman/ singer”

Safety


Because these children will be running around the circle changing chair quite quickly, safety is defiantly something that you need to be aware of. It’s quite easy for small children to trip over the chairs and run into each other. It’s probably best to space the chairs far apart, and talk to the children about taking care not to run into each other.

You can find more info about the game as wells as videos on how to do it here

Kids ESL: Game: Fruit Basket

[aurays]

Thanks kidsesl for the detailed game explanation

I played many fruit games with kids in the past and they always liked them a lot. I will definitely give this one a try!

[ska45]

I am so glad to read your post with the info and links today. I am also teaching young children in Japan and I think this will be fun with my energetic group. We don't have chairs as our room has tatami flooring, but I think it will work just fine with the cushions we do use.
Thank you!