Before the activities

This summer vacation, I was invited to be the lecturer of a workshop. It aims to help those teachers who have less experience because they may be the part-time teachers, interns who were just graduated from college, or the first-year new teachers. All the teachers in this workshop need to help students get more motivation to learn English. Therefore, they need multiple activities or strategies to help those who are in need. All the games can also be the warm up activities for the first or second week of a new semester.

Activity 1: Guess the name

Objective: Know the name of the new teacher
Materials needed: a set of alphabet cards
Steps:

1. Divide students into teams.
2. Put all the alphabet cards on the blackboard
3. Tell students they need to guess the teacher’s name
4. Draw five blanks
5. Teamstake turns guessing what are the letters in the teacher’s name
6. The one who has any right letter can get a point for his team.
7. Finish when the whole name is on the board.

Rules:

1. Be quiet
2. No shouting
3. Raise hands when you want to guess the letter.

Activity 2: Colorful Spelling

Objective: Practice easy word spelling
Materials needed: a set of alphabet cards, 9 magnetswhich contains 3 different colors.
Steps:

1. Divide students into three teams.
2. Put all the alphabet cards on the blackboard
3. When teacher shouts a word, students need to look for the letters and put the magnets on the letter.
4. The teacher counts ten seconds and says, “Time is up.”
5. See how many points they get for each team.
6. For example, the teacher says, “mother”. Team A puts one magnet on “m”, one magnet on “o”. Team B puts one magnet on “t”. Team C puts one magnet on “h”, one magnet on “e”, one magnet on “r”. It means, team A can get 2 points, team B can get 1 point, and team C can get 3 points.

Rules:

1. Listen carefully.
2. Be quiet.
3. No shouting.

Activity 3: SentenceMatching

Objective: Practice Speaking
Materials needed: 12 sentence strips
Steps:

1. You need to prepare 12 sentence strips for the game.
2. 6 sentences are questions and 6 sentences are the answers to the questions.
3. All the sentences need to face down.
4. Each time, one student goes to the front.
5. She/he chooses two cards and turn them back.
6. If She/he chooses two correct cards to match, she/he can win one point and the teacher will take away the cards which already match. (e.g.What’s your name? My name is Heidi.)
7. However, if She/he chooses wrong cards to match, she/he cannot win any point and she/he need to turn the cards back again. (e.g. What’s your name? I’m six years old.)

Notes:

1. The other students on the seat can give hints to help the student on the platform, but only in English. (The hints can be, “left, right, up or down)
2. This game quickly gets very noisy so the students need to be reminded to keep the talking to a minimum.

Activity 4: Card Exchanging

Objective: Practice Speaking
Materials needed: 28 word cards (14 pictures, 14 words) and one sentence pattern from the publisher
Steps:

1. You need to prepare word cards for each student to play the game.
2. Each student gets one card
3. Students need to stand up, walk around and ask their classmates questions according to the questions. And then exchange the cards.
4. Go to the next person, ask and answer again. Then, exchange the card again.
5. For example, the teacher gives each student a country card. Each student holds his card, goes to his friend, and asks, “Where are you from?” The other one answers and then exchanges the card with each other.
6. After one minute, the teacher will ask the students to go back to their seat.
7. The teacher draws a lucky spinner from the Internet. (It’s an online application, which is called “wheel of names”.)
8. The teacher needs to key in all the words on the spinner, and it goes around to decide which card is the lucky card.
9. For example, the teacher keys in all the names of the countries and press the “play” button. It will spin and stop on a certain country.
10. Students who hold the lucky country in the hand can win the point.

Conclusion

Improving the learning effectiveness and reducing learning frustration or pressure is really important in any class. Learners get a sense of accomplishment in the game because they can get some enjoyment from it. The games help draw children’s attention. With excitement, students are willing to participate more in class.

Activity 1: Guess the teacher’s name(Heidi)	Activity 2: Spell words with 3 color magnets
Activity 3: Sentence Matching Match the question and answer	Activity 4: Wheel of names Card Exchanging