Vocabulary Clues

• Prepare a list of vocabulary you have recently studied in class. Divide the class into two teams. Read the class clues for each word, for example, “It is an animal. It eats meat. It lives in the jungle. It has a tail and stripes.” The first student to correctly call out “Tiger” wins one point for her team. Award an extra point for good pronunciation. Repeat with new words for 20 minutes. Stop the activity and declare one team the winner.
  
  

Jobs Vocabulary

• Divide the class into groups of three or four and ask each group to sit around a table. Place ten pieces of card with a picture of a person in a job-related uniform face-down on the left-hand side of each table, for example a nurse, a fireman and a pilot. Place face-down on the right-hand side of each table ten pieces of card with the name of each job written on it. Students take it in turn to pick a card from the right-hand side of the table and to read the word aloud. They then pick a card from the left-hand side of the table, look at the picture and say the job. They keep the cards if the two cards match but replace them in exactly the same spot if they are different. The winner is the student who has the most pieces of card at the end of the game.
  
  

Country Anagrams

• Divide the class into groups of three or four. Write an anagram of a country on the board, for example, “ainerig.” The first student to say, “Nigeria” wins a point for their team. Ask each group to prepare five more country anagrams. When each group has finished, ask one student from each group to, in turn, write her group's anagrams on the board. The other groups try to guess each country to win a point for their team.
  
  

Words From Words

• Write on the whiteboard a word with four letters such as “late.” Invite the class to change one letter of this word to form a new word, for example, “gate.” Invite the class to change one letter of this new word to form yet another, for example, “game.” Continue until the class runs out of ideas or the whiteboard is full. Arrange the class into groups of three or four. Write a new four-letter word, for example, “dine” on the board. Set a time limit of five minutes. Each group works in the same way to write down as many words as they can. After five minutes, stop the activity and ask each group to read their words. The team with the most words wins.