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Write Now!

ESL/EFL Game Profile
Name of Game:
Write Now!
Target Students:
Middle School
Target Students:
High School
Duration:
15-25 minutes
Number of Students:
Any
English Skills:
Spelling
English Skills:
Writing
English Skills:
Vocabulary
Objective:
Use substitution to practice vocabulary
Instructions
  1. Break students into teams
  2. Each team will select a student to be the writer
  3. The teacher writes a sentence on the board with a blank in it, such as "I like ___."
  4. Each team must fill in the blank with as many English words as possible in one minute
  5. Have teams turn in their papers and mark the correct answers
  6. Explain the incorrect ones.
  7. The team with the most correct answers wins
  8. Have teams change writers, write a new sentence, and play again
Notes

Make sentences structures that allow students to practice grammar structures they are learning, such as countable and uncountable nouns. Students get pretty loud shouting out answers to their writers so be sure to close the doors and windows.

 

A big thanks to Steve for this EFL/ESL game!

Games for Korean Middle School Students

I used this game with my Korean 7th grade class and it woked great!

Results

I've used this game at two schools already, and it has been very successful, even among my worst students. The weakest students can participate, yet the strongest ones who are writing on the board will make many mistakes.

Since my level 1 Korean middle schoolers were learning "I like ___." from the textbook, I used that sentence. After the first round, with every class, the students always write sentences like this:

I like apple.
I like book.
I like house.

I let them make that mistake on the first round, and then let them do it again after having the co-teacher explain that plurals are needed with most countable nouns. Some of my students made the mistake twice with the countable nouns, so if your students are poor listeners, you might have to repeat the activity three or four times.

Thank you Steve for this

Thank you Steve for this game.  I am thinking of how I can adapt it to use in my SAT class, to reinforce to my students how multiple words/phrases/clauses can be used to function as a particular fixed/specified part of speech in a deceptively simple sentence.  Wow!  Cool

great game

I just used this game with my grade one High School students to reinforce "I always.." "I never...", "I sometimes..", "I must not...." etc (what they are learning currently).  It was great.  I had the students take turns to come up and write their answer in columns on the board.  After each round I went through the sentences and got the class to help me correct them (sometimes they could tell if a sentence wasn't quite right but even the stronger students struggled with knowing how to correct it).  In my next class I am going to trial the following point system

1 - each sentence, 2 - each correct sentence, 3 - each sentence 7 or 7+ words long (I don't expect many will get this), 1 bonus point for correcting another teams sentence (after each round).

 Cheers

Great English Game

Sounds like the game worked well for you. Make sure to let us know how your variation goes too!

English Grammar

I used this game in my High School and Adult classes and it worked well. I did use the word "would" in my sentence (ie: "I would like to____" because Koreans have a problem with the "wo" combination.

Time

A good game, I use it a lot with my students, the only thing I'd say is that twenty five minutes is very generous, I think you can get, at best, fifteen minutes out of this before it becomes boring.

I love this game. After

I love this game. After every round, I like to make a list of the most common mistakes and then we go again. Very useful for assessing the skill level of the students.