You will be well acquainted with Charades or Pictionary and you have probably used it in your classroom. If you don't have the boxed version to hand, you can easily make your own using a Quizlet set, and use it as a warm-up (WUP) exercise in your next ESL lesson.
You might want to open your lesson (young learner or adult) with a game, and to do so, you'll often need to reactivate some vocabulary. Creating a quick flashcard set on Quizlet is an easy way to manage this. Add seven to nine new lexical items after every lesson, so you always have a ready-made set of words you want your students to know.
You can use this set as a word list for several games:
- Pictionary – explain, draw or mime a given word for the other students to guess.
- 20 Questions (also known as "hot chair") – one student chooses a word, and the others, in teams, can ask up to twenty questions in total to guess it.
- Categorising games – students devise their own categories for the chosen words, with complete freedom over what categories to use.
- Definition race – in pairs, students take turns explaining words to their partner, who has to guess them; whoever explains the most words in one minute wins.
- and so on.
Find an example with 15 words for an A1 young-learner course here.
You can also turn the set into a monolingual or bilingual word list and share the link with your students. This way, they can work through all the learning activities (Learn, Write, Spell, Test, Match, Gravity) to practise the words' spelling, meaning(s) and pronunciation.
Mind: This post was originally published in November 2020, Quizlet has changed since then and it only offers all the services to subscribers.