Puzzles - Games and activities for all levels

39 ESL Vocabulary Activities: For Teenagers and Adults - Jackie Bolen, Jennifer Booker Smith 2015

Puzzles
Games and activities for all levels

Skills: Reading/Writing

Time: 10-30 minutes

Materials: A puzzle

Puzzles are an excellent way to review vocabulary and I find that most students enjoy doing them, particularly teenagers. They can also work very well for “quiet” classes that don't have a lot of outgoing students in them where it's hard to do some of the more active games like charades. It's really easy to make puzzles yourself using something like Discovery.com's Puzzlemaker (www.discoveryeducation.com/free-puzzlemaker) and it's actually the preferable option since you can include all the specific vocabulary that you'd like. I prefer to use the criss-cross option because it has the most educational benefit since it deals with meanings as well as vocabulary words.

Procedure:

1. Go to Discovery.com and find the puzzlemaker.

2.Design your puzzle (criss-cross is best!), using words and definitions. Alternatively, you could give hints about the word related to the context you'd use it in instead of the actual definition. Here are two examples:

This animal has black and white stripes (skunk).

If a ... sprays you, you'll smell really bad (skunk).

3. Have students complete the puzzle. I usually make it a bit competitive by putting them in pairs and awarding the first couple of teams a prize of some sort.

4. It's up to you whether or not to allow dictionaries or textbooks. In my experience, dictionaries don't really help that much while the course book where the words came from really does. You could also say that for the first five minutes, they must only use their brains, but they can use anything they want after that. If there is a particularly hard one that no student is able to get, I'll give the entire class a hint.