Games

Review ~ Expressive English
Reviewed Dec 2010 by Clare Welch

Expressive English

I am a fan of using games in my teaching and so I think this product is a great idea!

Basically, this product is a 52-card deck just like regular playing cards, going from Ace to King and with 4 suits. The only difference is that these cards have been created to practise English language points. The pack includes some brief suggestions on how to play, but the principle idea is to use the language pattern on the card in a sentence and to say it aloud to the other players. It can be incorporated into any card game you wish to use.

What does this mean in practice? Having tried this out, one example I can offer is to play a game of Rummy and challenge the students to make a sentence using the target language on the card whenever they exchange a card. Also, to win at the end they must have an appropriate sentence for each of their 7 cards. Runner-up places can be determined by correct sentences made from the cards that other players hold. Another suggestion, this time from Expressive English, involves using the cards for dialogue building, with cards being randomly drawn from the deck and students using the target expression to follow on from a previous statement to form a continuous dialogue.
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MasterTalker
Reviewed Oct 2009 by Paula Swenson

MasterTalker is a board game designed to give groups of 2-6 players (age 14 +) an enjoyable way to actively use the language skills they have acquired and practice speaking. The game is a professionally produced product: colorful, substantial, and made to last. The language components are well-thought out and, with 900 questions, ample for
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Interactive Games and Activities for Language Learning
Reviewed Sep 2009 by Lydia Schrandt

We’ve all been there. It’s Sunday night and you sit down to plan your lessons for the week. You open up the textbook to find a less-than-compelling lesson on past tense grammar rules. Yuck! To make matters worse, there is NOTHING communicative about the book’s activities at all. It’s late, you’re tired, and you simply don’t have it in you to stay up all night preparing materials for some grand lesson to make up for a lackluster curriculum. What do you do?
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Phrazzle Me
Reviewed Jun 2009 by Alison Susans

Phrazzle Me is a word game made up of 200 wooden blocks. Each side of every block has a word on it – most of them are in black, some in red. Each player picks 7 blocks out of the bag and tries to make a sentence. The next person can then either add to the sentence(s) already on the table or create a new one. Each word gives you points; if you use a red word you get double points and if you manage to use all 7 blocks in one go you get 50 points. The player with the highest number of points at the end of the game wins. The only rules are that the sentences
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