English Club Activities

Ah...English Club...What to do what to do???

Different schools use English Club for different purposes. If you are being put in charge of English Club, find out what the club’s goals are first and foremost. Some schools might use English club for students preparing for speech contests. Others might be using them for English exam preparation. Still others will use them for fun English activities and a chance to interact more with the ALT. If this is the case here is a host of game ideas.

Headbands

• Students: 3+
• Materials: Thick cloth elastic from Daiso and cards with pictures and names of famous people, cartoon characters or people from your school on them.
• How to Play:

1. Students choose a card without looking at it and put it into their headband so that everyone else can see who they are.
2. Going around in a circle students take turns asking questions about who they are. Ex, am I an entertainer? Where am I from?
3. First person to guess who they are wins!

Spoons

• Students: 4+
• Materials: A set of spoons, but have one less than for each player. So if 6 are playing have only 5. Also a set of 40 or so sturdy cards with vocabulary words from different categories. Good categories are colours, animals, English speaking countries, school events, words that mean ‘big’ etc etc just adjust for the level of your students.

To challenge your students a bit, don’t write the category of the card and let the students figure it out, otherwise you’d better write the category title on the top of the card or it can be too confusing for lower level students.

• How to Play:

Everyone should be seated in a circle, place the spoons in a pile in the center. Deal out all of the cards to your group, on the count of 3 select a card from your hand to pass to the person on your right. Your goal is to collect all 4 of a kind. Once you have, take a spoon. If you see someone else take a spoon you must take a spoon as well! If you don’t get a spoon you take a demerit point.

Be sure to have the student who completed their set explain their set of words to the other students and review any new words.

Scrabble

• Students: 3+
• Materials: I made my own scrabble board using this handy website. To make things a bit easier I added extra R S T L N E tiles.
• How to Play

Since real Scrabble takes too long I limited the game to three rounds. Who ever scored the most points in three rounds won. I also required my students to use the word they just spelled out in a sentence to make sure that they got enough speaking practice and everyone understood the word.

Cube of Fortune

• Students: 2+
• Materials: Dice that have dollar values on 4 sides and 'Bankrupt' and 'Lose A Turn' on the other 2. I made my own extra large ones out of foam core.
• How to Play:

Rules are just like Wheel of Fortune but with a cube, hence the name title. Always fun to watch students try to drop the dice in such a way they get $300 only to have it backfire and they roll Bankrupt instead.

Scattergories

• Students: 3+
• Materials: A white board and markers is nice but otherwise pens and paper and a way to keep time
• How to Play:

Write several categories in columns on the board, good categories are: Things at the Beach, In the Classroom, Things that are Red, Adjectives, Things You Eat, Things you Wear etc etc Choose a letter such as S, then the students need to come up with as many things that fit the categories that start with S within 2 or 3 minutes: Sand, swimming, surfing, surfers, seals etc etc...

The student / team with the most words wins.

Twenty Questions

• Students: 2+
• Materials: Writing stuff is good to have on hand for students to help keep track of information.
• How To Play:

Have a student think of a person or cartoon character. Then everyone else must ask yes or no questions in order to find out who the person is. They must find out who the person is in less than 20 questions. Sometimes the students will need to write down answers to help them keep track of information.

Karuta

• Students: 2+
• Materials: A set of cards, one set can be English words, the other half can be Japanese translations. Or for a challenge have words with similar pronunciations and spellings like Made and Mad
• How to Play:

Lay out the cards on a table and call out words. Students have to grab the correct card, then they get to keep it. Student with the most cards wins. This game will never get old!

Beat the Clock

• Students: 2+
• Materials: Sometime to keep time with, an iPod with headphones, a set of cards with questions on them, you can adjust for your students’ level. Name two colors, Name something you can buy at a conbini, Name two things you drink etc etc
• How to Play:

Have the students pair up and then each select 5 or so questions. One student listens to music (English music of course) while their partner attempts to answer all the questions as fast as possible (alternatively you can have your students answer as many questions as they can in 1 minute). Once one student has answered them all or has run out of time, the students switch places. The student who answered the questions the fastest, or who answered the most questions in the time limit wins. This game also makes for a fun Bunkasai Event.