[claire19]

hi,
last friday i have started to give private lessons of English to 3 young girls aged about 8.
i ' ve no ideas about games to do using flashcards(i realized that using them only to teach the girls vocabulary is boring for them);or other games.can anybody help me?
chiara

[Shunderen]

I also teach 8 year old twice a week, I have apair of girls that are very restless and are constantly twitching and moving.

I also know that using flash cards can only help for mayb the first 10 minutes of your class to introduce laguange used.

The best classes I have had are actually using board games.

Go find a store that sell English versions of Monopoly or any board game, they must use their English to communicate and they have fun doing it.

Games like 'Sorry' work well. 4 colors each colour has a meaning. If you land on a red square they must tell you the name of a fruit.

My students love Jenga, Write a topic on the board and they must make sentence with that topic.

For example.
time expressions go through alesson teaching, IN/ AT/ ON/ SINCE/ Ago.. and so on.

Then they must make sentence with those words. When they use a noun wirite it down so they cannot use the same noun more than once.

If they say, Yesterday I went to school at 8:00am.
The next person cant use, 'yesterday' or 'school'.

If their sentence is wrong they remove a block from the jenga tower, if it is right you take one. They love to try and defeat the teacher.


I hope some of these ideas help you as I know that age group can be very rediculous to teach and getting them to stay still is a challenge in itself.

Good Luck

[Dave-B]

Great ideas from Shunderen, and I would only support those thoughts.

Use games that they know from their other classes. Quick examples might be hangman, tic tac toe, etc. Games for school children can be easily adapted to get them speaking or using a target vocabulary.

The advantage here is they are using games they know and are comfortable with, and don't even realize they are speaking and communicating in English without all the traditional flashcard/ESL stuff.

[claire19]

thank you shunderen.I think i will try with the colour game.the other games for the moment are too difficult for them 'cause they have started studying English only 2 years ago at school and and from this year they don't even have got a English teacher;its the italian teacher(im italian)that teach them English.I think she is even ridiculous because she wants them to read in English when they are still learning to read in italian!

anyway thanks a lot!

ps with flash cards i will do a memory game(i have made 2 copies of some of them and i put them turned on the blank side on the table; the aim of the game is to find out the pair of cards that are the same and tell the name of the thing represented on it).
bye

[simplyesl]

Take a look at mes-english.com there's a good board game there that I used when teaching small groups.

[roja123]

If you want to use flash cards you can play Snap, Memory and Go Fish, but you do need more than one set of flash cards for these.