Charades with speaking - Games and activities for all levels

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

Charades with speaking
Games and activities for all levels

Skills: Speaking

Time: 20-30 minutes

Materials: Whiteboard

You can use this activity to review whatever vocabulary you’re teaching (verbs work especially well). Write down some words or phrases that can be easily acted out on small pieces of paper and put them in an envelope.

Divide the class into two teams. The first team sends one person (the captain) up to the front and he/she has to act out and describe in English as many things as possible in two minutes. Alternatively, you can have each team member rotate through the captain role during a single 3-4 minute round. The first person describes the first word and after his/her team guesses it, then he/she can go to the back of the line and the next person comes up. Then, the next team will go. You can do as many rounds as you want with different captains.

Teaching Tips:

To add even more fun, if there is a team that is behind by a lot of points you can have a double and then a triple bonus round to give them some hope that they can catch up and maybe even win.

Procedure:

1. Prepare some words or phrases beforehand, based on whatever you're teaching.

2. Divide the class into two teams and each team can choose its first captain.

3. Team A sends its captain to the front and he/she randomly chooses a paper and must describe and act it out.

4. Team A must then guess what the captain is describing. When the team guesses correctly, the captain takes another word and the game continues. Alternatively, you can have the students rotate the captain role amongst themselves during the course of a single round. In this case, make the round a bit longer—maybe four minutes instead of two.

5. Each round is 2-4 minutes and each team tries to get as many words as possible.

6. The other teams goes next and uses different words.

7. You can play as many rounds as you want, but make sure you have different captains for each one so everyone gets a chance to describe the words.