Games about Classroom Objects for ESL and Kindergarten Classrooms

Materials: Flash Cards
Time: 5 minutes
Receptive Language: ‘What’s this?’
Productive Language: unit vocabulary

Game Explanation: A quick warm-up / review. Sitting in front of the class with a stack of flash cards (you may want to include cards from previous months as well as the current month’s), demonstrate to the students that you will show them the cards one by one & that if any of the students can correctly identify the cards, the entire class scores a point, whereas if they cannot, you, the teacher, score a point.

Continue until you’ve gone through the entire stack & have the students count the final scores with you.
Note: Try not to win, but work some obvious cheating in to amuse the students. Guaranteed to work.

Materials: paper or sticky notes
Time: n/a
Receptive Language: target vocab
Productive Language: target vocab
Game Explanation: Put clearly printed labels on everything in the classroom. Review each item every day.

Materials: various
Time: 5-6 minutes
Receptive Language: ‘Touch the ____’, ‘Point to the ___’, etc
Productive Language: various
Game Explanation: Call out an instruction (‘Touch the book,’ ‘Point to the window’, ‘Touch this bag’, etc) while touching or pointing to the object in question with the whole class until they get the idea. Gradually withdraw from the activity until you are only vaguely looking in the direction of the object you want the students to either touch or point to. Any students who touch or point to the wrong object are out (& if all the students manage to touch or point to the correct object, the last student to do so is out). Make sure they repeat the correct phrase (‘Touch the door!’, etc) after they’ve performed the action. repeat with the champion from the previous round calling out the instructions.