Bag of Tricks

Practice different Verb Tenses (Present simple tense, present progressive, past simple, past progressive, present perfect, future tenses and more) using this ESL Jeopardy Quiz Game. This game is also excellent for classroom teaching. Teachers can engage students in a classroom grammar review for elementary ESL, EFL Learners.

Read this text about B.B. King and check the speed of your reading.This kind of activity can be helpful especially for those students who are preparing for exam programs such as IELTS.

Vocabulary is Fun! It is important to teach idioms in the English language classrooms since they are frequently used in the speaking discourse with native speakers and if the learners are unaware of them they will fail to understand what they mean. I tried this activity with learners and saw that it was challenging for them but little by little they overcame the difficulties.

A very fun business crossword game. It will help to improve business vocabulary. To my opinion this game is ideal for both business English learners and general English learners!

Mostly everybody knows this game and enjoys watching it. Why don't we use this game for teaching purposes as well? I tried it with my students when we were covering the topic "countries and nationalities" and they liked it a lot. They even told me that they tried playing this game on other topics as well. So, go ahead and try yourself!

Like it very much and will play at home.

This game helps students to improve their knowledge on pronouns. They are given 10 multiple choice questions, If they have chosen incorrect option they have to try again. I used this game as a follow up activity as a part of their homework (after explainig the pronouns in the class). They told me they liked it and they even noted that this game helped them to understand the usage of pronouns better.

This game is a good practice for demonstrative pronouns as well as for English sentence structure. I tried this with my little son. He had learnt demonstrative pronouns at his school and EEC and this was a kind of follow up activity.

This is a very popular fairy tale translated in many languages of the world. So the children will be familiar with the plot and even if they don't know some words they can guess the meaning. Here they have listening with script, which will help them to develop their listening and reading skills. I played this fairy tale for my little son . He watched it with pleasure and said that the ending is different from other red hat fairy tales.

A very good and engaging tool to use in the classroom and have a follow up discussion. Everybody loves spekaing about their wishes, this way they will watch a video, have some vocabulary on the topic and then express their wishes. I think this way the students will be very engaged in the discussion and improve both their listening and speaking skills. This will best work with adults or young adults, intermediate level. I haven't used it yet in my classes, but I will for sure:)

Knowing synonyms is important for L2 language learners in order not to repeat the same words in writing or in speaking. Although it is designed for the elementary level, I advise this activity for intermediate level because I experimented with children in elementary level I saw that the words are a little bit more sophisticated.

This video would best work with grown up kids. this video presents one of the greatest speeches, Franklin D. Roosevelt - Declaration of War. This video will improve the students' listening skills, give information about world war II and the students will not only listen to the speech but also see Franklin D. Roosevelt. This can be used when covering topics such famouse people, famouse speeches, history...afterwards they can have a debriefing discussion.

In general I have found the BBC Words In the News site to be very good. Here is a video exercise I found. It's probably best for int. to upper int. students. The Video includes and a PDF of the script can be downloaded separately if you wish. and there is an exercise included to reinforce the new grammar.

A fun game to develop parts of speech. It asks you to write many words then comes up with a funny story. When you have trouble remembering it even has an information page to help the player. Best for players who have sufficient grammar knowledge (11 and up)

This is a vocabulary building game. Scattered parts of words are given and one needs to put them together in order to form the most words and gain points. The definition of the new words are given.

Good extra practice/self assessment tool after teaching when to use gerunds vs. infinitives.

This is the famous "snakes and ladders" game that could be played alone or with 2 players. When one answers correctly, they get to roll the dice. This game is best for 7 to 9 year olds. At the end of the game, one can check all the correct answers.

Includes reading, listening, and vocabulary with an interesting topic that could be pulled integrated into a lesson rather easily.

This game can be played alone or with another player. It reminds the "Jeopardy" board with points, whereby the player must choose from and the questions are more challenging when the points are higher. The question appears right away and when the answer is correct, the player gains points and the next player chooses a category. If it is incorrect, the correct verb is given. The point board is shown every time you choose a category. Thought there is no flash, my students enjoyed it and thought it was a good way to review irregular verbs.

The first page of this game allows you to choose from 35 lessons geared to 6 graders. The game starts with a 10-word list to study. To play this game, one must write the word that is missing in the sentence, though you can hear it. You have a chose of letters, sounds or syllables to form the word. It is well done, since it targets word building, spelling and listening skills.