Creative Teacherette

The game of Taboo is one of my favorite party games and here's an idea how to use it in class when revising vocabulary . The game itself is a word guessing game, which is played in pairs. The objective is to have your partner guess the word you are describing without using that word and another three to five words written on the same card.   You can make your own taboo cards for a specific topic, but you can also make a Power Point presentation in which you put a word (or a picture of it) and some other words that are closely related to that word, but may not be used. If that's the case, you can divide your students into teams and they can play against each other. A student from each team has to come forward and sit or stand with his/her back to the screen and then the rest of his/her team have to describe the words. If the student guesses the word, the team gets a point and then it's another team's turn. You can even measure their time, so just give them a min...

A cinquain is a poem consisting of 5 verses, which can be used for many different things in an EFL classroom. This is the pattern of the poem:  1. the first line is a noun describing the subject of the poem; 2. the second line consists of two adjectives describing the noun in the first line; 3. the third line contains three verbs (infinitive or gerund form) that give more information about the subject; 4. the fourth line is a four-word phrase describing feelings related to that subject; 5. the fifth line is a noun again, a synonym of the subject in the first line. When doing literature, you can ask your students to write a cinquain about the story or about another poem. You can ask them to write a cinquain when introducing a new subject to see what their pre-knowledge is or use it as an introduction for a discussion in class. When there are some problems in the class you can also tell them to write a cinquain to express their feelings and you can always...

A paper snowball is a great prop for revising vocabulary. I made an activity with a paper snowball when I had to prepare revision of numbers, but it can be used for anything else. You just have to print or write certain words, numbers etc. on separate sheets of paper, each sheet containing one word, number, etc. Then you start forming a snowball. First you crumple one sheet of paper as much as you can. Than you wrap another one around it and crumple it as well. You continue doing that with the rest of the paper until you wrap everything and it looks like a snowball.  Tell your students to stand in a circle and start throwing the snowball to each other. Each student that catches it has to unfold one paper, show it to the rest of the class, read the word out loud and then translate it, or use it in a sentence, or explain what it means or whatever you want them to do. Make sure to explain how to throw a ball inside the classroom beforehand and make the letters of the words ...

Have you ever been thinking of bringing your favorite Saturday-evening-with-friends distraction to your classroom?   I have, and I have decided to take advantage of this amazing game of quick draw called Pictionary . The rules of the game are very simple – the players are divided into 2-4 teams and each team has a person who is drawing (not always the same player) and the others that are guessing. The drawers pull out cards with words written on them. The words are divided into categories, for example ˝object/person/place˝ or ˝hard˝ and there is a color for every category. The drawers have to draw the word that has a matching color with the field they are standing on the game board. The drawers have about a minute to draw the term and their teammates have to guess what they are drawing, i.e. guess the word. Of course, only drawing is allowed – no words or mime. Are you already seeing how amazing it would be to play the game with your students? Since the orig...