Hello and Happy Fri-yay everyone! We hope that this blog finds everyone happy, healthy, and excited for another Friday blog post from Literacy Connexus!
Today I just want to share a few simple activities that can be done with just index cards.
- Matching Pairs: This is a great activity to get students up and moving. You can have students find partners with matching word halves, synonyms, antonyms, phrasal verbs, idioms, prefixes, verbs families, the same beginning, end, or vowel sounds, or even words with their corresponding pictures or definitions. The possibilities are truly endless. One thing about this activity is that it can be modified for any level. Low level learners? Match words with pictures. Intermediate learners? Have them match synonyms or antonyms. High level learners? Have them match idioms or phrasal verbs. It’s perfect for any class.
- Scrambles: Another great activity is to get students working together is by having them do scrambles. You can have students start off small with scrambled sentences that can be adjusted to be level appropriate for your class or even different groups (perfect for a multilevel classroom). Or, another idea is to have students do story scrambles where they have to work together to put together the pieces of a story. This is another activity that can be adjusted for any level and it really focuses on group collaboration and makes room for plenty of authentic communication opportunities.
- Categories: For this activity, students will get index cards with several related words that belong to one category. The student then has to make up clues so that their classmates can guess the words on their cards. Other variations of this game are to have students work in groups to guess the category all the words on their belong to, or to give the students a category and have teams come up with as many words as possible on their index cards that fit into that category. This game is great for having students describe things in English, and it’s also perfect for having students review vocabulary from previous lessons.
These card game ideas came from the Teachers at the School for International Training’s book Index Card Games for ESL.
So what do you think, is it time to get some index cards in your classroom? I hope that these games have given you a few ideas on how to liven up your summer classes.
Until next time, blessings and happy teaching!
Don’t forget to subscribe! We have a giveaway coming up at 100 subscribers and you could win!