(reversed) who am i?

The teacher thinks of the person and the students have to ask him yes/no questions to find out who he is.

me too

Students sit together in a circle. Everyone in the group gets 10 poker chips/pennies/paper clips etc. Start the game by saying something that you have done. For example: I have gone skating. Everyone who has gone skating throws one poker chip in the middle of the table and repeats the sentence. Go around the circle until everyone has had a chance to say something. Continue the game until someone runs out of poker chips.

brainstorming

Split the students in teams and assign each team a task to brainstorm - e.g. think of the most uses for a paperclip. Let them 15-20 minutes to discuss and then compare the results in one big team.

BONUS:
100+ uses for a paperclip: http://www.xrysostom.com/paperclip.html

speaking chest

Write down 15-20 interesting topics and put them in a box. The students take turn to draw a topic and to speak on it for 1 minute.

what's in the bag?

The idea: Get students to describe (in English) objects that they can touch but can't see.

Preparation: Several objects - eg stuffed toys, anything! a bag to hide the items in, paper and pens/pencils, imagination!

In the ESL classroom: Choose one student to describe the object. Give all the other students a piece of paper and a pencil (or can be done in teams with two or more students drawing on the white/black board). Explain to the class that (student name) will describe whatever they feel in the bag and the rest of the class must draw it. The student whose drawing best matches the item being described is the winner. If students are having trouble describing, try throwing in a few words like: short, long, tall, fat, thin etc.

word chain

One student says a word then the next student has to say a word that begins with the last letter of the word that was just said. eg: S1 "YelloW" S2 "WindoW" S3 "WinD" S4 "DoG" etc etc.

Here are some of the rules I use with this game. You can pick and choose which ones you want:

1) Have a time limit.
2) Put students into teams.
3) Words can''t be repeated.
4) Words have to contain at least X amount of letters.
5) Words can''t contain a certain letter(s)
6) Words MUST contain a certain letter(s)

my name is sausage

In this game students ask each other questions and they must answer with a specific word. This word can be absolutely anything! For example the word is "sausage".

S1 "What''s your name?" S2 "My name''s sausage!"

S1 "What do you look like?" S2 "I look like a sausage!"

Make sure the students maintain the correct sentence structure for the questions. ie Even though they are answering "sausage" to "What''s your name?" they still have to use the "My name is" structure

This is a great activity and really gets students thinking about what questions they will ask!

two truths and a lie

Students write on papers three facts about them, one of which is going to be false. After that they start to mix and mingle and have to find out, which of the facts are false.

yes/no

The teacher aks questions to the student. The student has to answer them without saying yes or no, otherwise he/she loses.