The best end of term revision games

One way of finishing the term is with Xmas-themed stuff (see the post below). Another good one is lots of fun revision games.

As I’ve spent a few years teaching students who want to do every page in the book but have zero tolerance for anything that is not fun (e.g. about 75% of Language to Go), I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to come up with fun review activities. Add to that the fact that our students here get their final marks more than a weekbefore the end of term, and that adds up to Alex spending hours scouring the tapescripts for words worth revising and searching his brain for games that work with a whole term of random words, expressions and grammar. And here are the ideas I’ve come up with (mainly meaning stolen from other TEFL books), in reverse order of how much I use them:

4. The definitions game

Pure simplicity. Give them some words you want to revise and they try to explain which one they have chosen until their partner(s) can work out which one it is. More fun than it sounds. Available here as:

New Headway Pre-Int Vocab Revision Definitions game

As usual, the best way with TEFLtastic worksheets is to cut and paste from the webpage into Word, adjust sizes, and print

3. Taboo

One step up in terms of difficulty and fun is for students to be given 3 words that they cannot say when trying to explain which word they have chosen. If the students make the playing cards for each other, this adds even more to the fun, challenge and usefulness of revision. An example of this is:

Market Leader Pre Intermediate Taboo Vocab game

2. Ask and tell ( Truth or dare)

This is possibly the best TEFL game ever!

You can make them challenging each other even more fun and add some personalised speaking by giving them words and expressions that they can make personal questions about. They choose a random card, make a question, flip a coin, and either answer the question themselves (if it was a tail) or ask it to someone in their group (if it was heads). It tends to get a bit risque, but as they are making the questions themselves (and often end up being most embarrassed by their own questions), they accept it even if they wouldn’t as a conversation topic set by you.

Examples:

New Headway Pre Vocab Revision Ask or Tell game

1. Revision rotating board game

I can’t outdo that one for fun and them doing everything themselves without complaining, but this one is possibly even better for the amount of language you can revise, putting functional language, situational roleplays, grammar, and collocations and other vocab all into the same game.

The squares on the board have challenges that students can get points for, e.g. one point for every time they guess something true about their partner, one point for every way of answering the phone they can remember, one point for every adjective opposite, or one point for every line in a dialogue they improvise. Whenever they make a mistake (factual or language), they have to stop and count how many points they got in that challenge. That is then the number of squares they can move on the board.

For further explanation and 20 examples, see this whole post on the topic:

TEFLtastic classics Part 13

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