1. You should have fun! Along these lines, wear a smile!
2. Have the ability to act silly – I often dress-up when reading books, play charades, make silly voices and faces, and sing and dance!
3. Have lively music that is easy for the children to understand and that you will enjoy singing very loudly to!
4. TPR- Total physical response is a must for every lesson. Find out more by reading this post.
5. Board games- We play Twister, bingo, and more!
6. Include stories from great children’s authors and make the reading time fun. Check out my class wiki for various books and the themes they support.
7. Use colorful flashcards and play games with the flash cards.
8. Color with a purpose! Give children a task to see if they can follow directions, such as telling a child to draw a circle and color it yellow. Without direction, I’ve had children color on the wall and on me!
9. Puppets are great for children, especially when you incorporate the puppet in every lesson.
10. Felt boards are great for having children piece together what happened in a story or to learn new vocabulary.
11. Include hands-on activities. We use recycled materials and children create things for the theme.
12. Use realia- My students play Bingo with pennies from the USA. Introduce real world objects to students from an English speaking culture.
13. Trust kids with technology! My five year-old students complete online activities each week which I put in a wiki. Kids love technology and will repeat what they learn.
14. Finger plays like the Itsy Bitsy Spider work wonders.
15. When all else fails, try channeling the inner kid within yourself!

Shelly Sanchez Terrell began teaching inner city children in 1994 in Texas as part of a Christian pantomime and puppetry troop. She later managed hands-on science museum programs for children. In 2000, her nonprofit organization, ETHOS, won the SAMMinistries Volunteer Group of the Year award for their creation of a homeless children’s art and music program, which involved slam poets, artists, and musicians. For the past two years she has taught English to children, teenagers, and adults in Germany.

Thank you Barb for giving me the opportunity to write about teaching children!

However, I’ve been traveling for workshops a lot for the past six months, and have had to cancel quite a few classes. During the last week of September and the first 2 weeks of October alone, I was home for 6 days. So, I thought parents might actually prefer that I let Halloween pass without notice this year, and get back to the business of having regular English class.

Then, Ha-chan came up to me after class to tell me that she was going to be a princess this year. She was a witch last year, and quite envious of the one princess who attended the party. (You can see the costumes in this post about last year’s party.)

I couldn’t disappoint a 4 year old princess, could I?

Halloween 2011: The year of the princess

So, I dug out the Halloween decorations and headed down to the 100 yen store for the materials needed to plan a very quick party. Like the mom sneaking veggies into a meal, I hoped to have a couple of fun Halloween party games that snuck in some good language practice.

During the party for the younger kids, we played a matching card game to practice modifying nouns with adjectives (black cat). Packs of colored blank name cards make great playing cards for little hands. The rules are similar to Uno–you can play a card that is the same object (a ghost, for example) or the same color as the previous card played. Students have to describe the card they play (blue ghost). Add in a selection of cards to reverse the order of play, skip a player, change the color, etc., and you have (what my students declared was) a fun game.

The younger kids also enjoyed singing “Five Creepy Spiders” from the Super Simple Halloween CD, and moving as if we were spiders crawling, skeletons dancing, black cats running, witches flying, and ghosts haunting. The enhanced CD also had picture cards and activity sheets, which provided the art for our games and nice take-home Halloween homework packs.

The older kids didn’t want to dress up, but still wanted a party. They made their own game to practice pesky word order in sentences. I gave them four milk carton cubes and had them fill the 24 sides with eight nouns, six adjectives, six verbs and four conjunctions. Because it was for a Halloween party, they used appropriately spooky words (vampire, scary, drooled). On each turn, students wrote down the words they rolled on each of the four dice. When they collected enough words to make a sentence they earned a point.

This game turned out to be a bigger winner than I had anticipated. In fact, they had so much fun making sentences that they didn’t want to move on to other games and activities and nearly skipped the food and drinks part of the party, too.

For 500 yen (for the cards) and about an hour’s preparation time, the “parties” turned out pretty well. Turns out that all you have to do is announce that it’s a party rather than a class, provide a few theme activities and a bit of food. Students supply the party attitudes all by themselves.

My little princesses went home satisfied for another year

Happy Halloween!

What I have finally decided to do is to bring the sea into the classroom; that is, to enable the students to do so by narrating a summer story in our very first lesson. (They have already taken some short holidays themselves, so there must be something to talk about!) Which stories are better than those stemming from our direct experience? To facilitate things even more, I have decided to model the narration of a story and then ask them to act accordingly. All this will, of course, have to be eventually combined with the appropriate ‘dose’ of technology to make it even more … irresistible!

As for the students’ background, they are B1, B2 and C2-level learners, aged 14-16, so they are already familiar with all basic narrative tenses as well as linking words and phrases that are necessary for the cohesion of the text. They also have various family holiday or camp experiences, which means that they possess all the ‘material’ they need to tell their own story. The lesson could take place in a usual classroom, using a laptop to illustrate the story, or in the computer room. What is very positive about this activity is its flexibility: it can be adapted to a number of levels since the resources utilized can be quite simplified at parts, depending on the complexity of the students’ output a teacher expects.

A lesson of this kind could consist of these stages:

1. Quickly revise past tenses and linking expressions. Refer students to a related blog post that contains a number of tips and steps to writing a story. This revision could take the form of a small competition or quiz.
2. Urge students to imagine that they are sitting around a camp fire at night sharing personal stories. Read your story and let the music you have chosen play in the background.

This is a short story I have written after actually seeing a ‘forgotton’ flamingo on a sandy Cretan beach. A message can be derived at the end and there is the possibility of a certain extent of debate in class concerning which life philosophy students tend to favour: the active or passive, almost fatalist, stance.

3. When you finish, ask comprehension questions (about who, where when) followed by some open-ended questions (the character students identified with, the moral of the story, etc.)

4. Ask them to plan their story in class, having given them photocopies of one of the many impressive story organizers available online. The story film organizer, the branching organizer, the cake paragraph format or a more simple plan are only a few of the numerous resources that can be discovered on the web. After the learners come up with some basic ideas, they can exchange views or cooperate to find suitable endings.

5. In the next lesson or at home, students can write the full version of their story based on the planning that took place in class, publish it on the class blog and combine it with the photos or the music they like. They should be careful, though, not to disclose any personal information, as their work will be in common view.

There are already some of my students’ summer stories published on their class blogs:

Rafaela’s summer story on ‘Girl Power’ (A2+ level)

Nassia’s story on ‘Girl Power’ (A2+ level)

Helena’s summer nightmare on ‘FCE Students’ (B2 level)

‘Drawing in the sand’ by Izoldi on ‘FCE Students’ (B2 level)

Helen Lag’s story on ‘Literature Blog’ (C2 level)

Elen’s story on ‘Literature Blog’ (C2 level)

Much more samples of writing will be available this week. Till I publish more links in the comment section, try to share a story with your students; not only will you encourage them to speak and write, but also to bond with you! Isn’t this one indispensable ingredient of successful teaching?

Christina Markoulaki is a certified EFL teacher in Greece, where she was also born. She is fortunate enough to have been trusted with students of all ages and levels within her 5 working years, their ages ranging from 4 to 44 years old! Using modern technology in the classroom to create new learning experiences is what fascinates her. All links concerning the school she works in can be found on this colourful glog!

I had so much fun doing the activity myself I decided to use it with both my young learners and my more mature learners. It worked beautifully! Six words doesn’t intimidate anyone, so even my weakest writers enjoyed thinking of their stories. Six words also creates an effective framework for activating some micro-grammar awareness—especially word order in sentences, and the need for pesky little words in English (like BE verbs and articles).

I did a Creative Commons search on Flickr to find funny photos for the project, and collected them in galleries. (Click on “dogs” and “class” in my galleries if you’d like to see all of the photos we used.) Then, I printed the photos so students could work with them more easily (especially since one of the places I teach doesn’t have Internet access). Students chose the photos that appealed to them, and worked on creating their stories.

Here’s one of the pictures my young learners chose, and how their story developed:

Student 1: Horse angry.
Me: What kind of word goes in front of “horse?”
Student 1: A? The?
Me: A horse? The horse? Which one sounds right?
Student 2: The horse. (pointing to the horse in the picture).
Me: Right. It’s a specific horse.
Student 1: The horse angry.
Me: What’s missing? (pointing to the space between “horse” and “angry”)
Student 3: Is.
Me: Yes.
Student 1: The horse is angry.
Me: Not six words.
Student: 2: The horse is very angry.
Me: Still not six words.
(group pause)
Student 3: The horse is very, very angry.

The process was similar with my mature learners (the baby of the class is 50), but they worked in pairs and then as a group so they could pool their grammar knowledge and help each other. Their life experience led to some very different stories. This was their favorite story:

photo by Matt Barber

I would trade my husband for him.

In the Philippines the game is played this way; children sit down in a circle facing each other. The child who is “It” walks around the circle with a hanky in his hand, and at random drops the handkerchief behind one of the other players sitting in the circle. The player picks up the handkerchief and chases “It” around the circle to try to give the handkerchief back before the child who is “It” can occupy the vacant spot left by the player in the circle.

This is my reinvention of the game for EFL classrooms, called Cat and Mouse. Instead of a handkerchief children are to identify the picture cards (vocabulary), and be the first to occupy a vacant spot in the circle.

CAT AND MOUSE

(Reinvention for EFL Classrooms)

Players: eight or more

Materials: picture cards

Target Language

Q: What is it?

A: It’s (a book).

Q: What do you have?

A: I have (a video game).

Q: Who’s (he)?

A: He is (Mr. Brown).

Q: What does (he) do?

A: He is (a baker).

Q: Where are you going?

A: I’m going to the (park).

How to play

Players sit in a circle facing each other. One player is the Mouse, and he walks around the circle with a picture card (vocabulary) in his hand. The sitting players (the Cats) clap their hands and say the chant:

“Cat and mouse

Cat and mouse

Run and catch me

And find your house!”

As the Mouse walks around, he tags one of the players and both run in opposite directions around the circle. When the Mouse and the Cat meet half-way, they practice a question and answer, followed by Rock Scissors Paper. The winner gets the card and both continue running  in opposite directions trying to take the vacant seat in the circle. The rule is:  if the runner who has the card is successful in taking the seat, he places the picture card at the center of the circle and the game continues with a new picture card (vocabulary). But if the runner who has the picture card remains standing, he must continue the game (as the Mouse) with the same card, until he is successful in securing a seat.

Marco Brazil has been training teachers and teaching children English for over fifteen years. He maintains strong a strong commitment to making English fun and easy for both teachers and learners. He occasionally writes articles and gives teaching presentations for Oxford Kid’s Club Teaching Tour mostly, on games (You can see handouts from his workshops here and here).  Marco is the director/owner of SmartKids Circle. You can find Marco on Facebook or follow him on his blog, Mabuhay Classroom.

The PDF file above shows how I structured my talk: I elaborated on four different, though interrelated, challenges which manifest themselves in EFL teaching combined with the corresponding solutions, the potential resources to be used and some examples from my personal experience. I consciously avoided complex educational jargon or the use of related bibliography. My words solely represented my everyday anxieties when it comes to my profession and my thoughts about the solutions I have given.

The first thing I noticed when I started teaching was that children, at least in my country, were not really used to reading books as an extracurricular activity apart from magazines or comics. It is undoubted, though, that children nowadays are overly busy and resemble the hard-working adults in all the responsibilities they have to carry out through the day (take for example, all types of extra classes like dance classes and doing homework on top of all that), so including reading in their activities was indeed a hard task.

You may be wondering why I am insisting on reading so much. The ability to cope with a written text is considered by many to be the number one activity to help the learner get the feeling of a language as well as acquire new vocabulary. I once heard during a seminar that the world’s greatest polyglot based her skills on reading various books. Thereby, not only do books enhance one’s knowledge of the language and the culture expressed through them, but they also contribute to the development of critical thinking skills and the ability for self-expression, which is the ingredient that completes the recipe for success in foreign-language exams, let alone in the real-life world.

Considering all the above, the question that was whirling into my mind was this: how can I  familiarize students with a variety of reading material, even the most reluctant of them? After gathering information from other teachers’ blogs, I finally decided to apply the read-aloud technique in the classroom. Apart from the texts included in the coursebooks, this kind of teaching allows literature texts to enter the classroom, without anyone having to spend extra time on them after the lesson ends.

This is what a read-aloud activity entails in brief: In a relaxing atmosphere including unobtrusive music and a circular arrangement of desks, the teacher sits in the centre reading short passages of the book aloud, fitting the level, needs and interests of the specific class. He/she needs to pause regularly to ask comprehension questions, explain difficult vocabulary or urge the students to predict what is going to happen next. As it can easily be seen, this activity trains the students’ listening and speaking skills, familiarizing them with a variety of texts at the same time. The students have the chance to look at the pictures of the book during the short intervals, also taking a look at the text that has been read by the teacher.

Another great thing about this activity is its outcome, as students have to reproduce the story or part of the story or their favourite scene in their own words together with their own drawings, which leads to the production of some wonderful team or individual projects, sometimes taking the form of a comic book. Examples can be found in the last column of the PDF file. Personally, I had a great time sharing stories with my younger students, like ‘Sherlock Holmes‘ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk‘. The latter was also combined with songs which the children utterly enjoyed. The resulting projects can be seen here or by clicking on the hyperlinked phrase ‘their favourite scenes’ in the Slideshare pdf.

The resources one needs to implement such an activity are not hard to find, especially if the school has got its own library or collection of children’s books. Reasonably priced books can always be bought, though, from local bookshops or online. I have also included the link to the wikipage where I have listed places on the web to download free e-books from.

I intend to continue the present post to elaborate on the other three challenges mentioned on the Slideshare file. In the meantime, you can find the recording of the whole seminar here. For those interested, a similar webinar is scheduled to take place in January. All the relevant information is available in this Facebook event.

My name is Christina Markoulaki and I am a certified EFL teacher in Greece, where I was also born. I am fortunate enough to have been trusted with students of all ages and levels within my 5 working years, their ages ranging from 4 to 44 years old! Using modern technology in the classroom to create new learning experiences is what fascinates me.

It’s Halloween, and time for another class party!

These were my students’ costumes for our Halloween party this year. Considering that dressing up wasn’t mentioned, I was impressed that they made such an effort to come in character!

Class parties can be a great reward for learning English. In our case, the theme of the party always closely matches the theme of recent lessons. This Halloween, that meant exploiting vocabulary for body parts because that’s what the younger kids have been learning about recently.

We played Bingo and a memory game (with cards made from free clip art—thanks to @talkclouds on Twitter), but used more familiar words –mouth and head, instead of fangs and skull, for example. If you need a ready-made set of cards for younger children, you’re welcome to download mine. They’re on google docs.

We also played a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey type of game, but rather than having students sticking pins in various locations on my walls (or on each other), we put the body parts on a pumpkin cut out that was on top of a table. Students were blindfolded, and then given the pumpkin’s eyes, nose, and mouth. They had fun trying to put the facial features on the jack o’lantern.

To continue with our body parts theme, students used candy pieces to add hair and faces to their witch cupcakes. After finishing their masterpieces (but before eating them) the children talked about their creations (and how many eyes and noses they’d decided to add to the faces).

Finally, parents stationed themselves at different spots around my house and the children went trick or treating. I noticed parents asking the kids to identify the colors of the candies, or to count the candies as they got them, and everyone had to say “thank you!” I love how the parents made the activity even better. The only unexpected result is that one of the younger children seems to have decided that “trick or treat” is just another way to say “thank you,” so I’ll probably be hearing “trick or treat” at the end of class for awhile.

I know it’s sneaky, but parties are a great way for children to have fun because they learned the language.

If you’d like to see more photos of our party (the cupcakes are definitely worth a peek!) I’ve put them together in an animoto video.

Happy Halloween!

Have you ever been to an auction sale before? An auction is defined as a type of sale where the price of an item is negotiated through the process of competitive and open bidding. It is normally a public sale at which items are sold to the person offering to pay the highest price.

However, this reinvention of auction for EFL classrooms doesn’t have any items up for sale; it doesn’t have any currencies or toy money involved. What is negotiated in this game is vocabulary (target language), and the means of exchange are number cards (from a deck of playing cards). The aim of the game is to put up the highest number (playing card) possible. This is “a winner takes it all game,” meaning, the player to put up the highest number card takes all the other cards.

Players

Four (4) or more

Target Language

(Teacher’s discretion)

In this video:

Class:  What do you have?

Player: I have (some paper).

Also good for practicing

Occupations

Class: What does (he) do?

Player: He is (a doctor).

Verbs (present continuous)

Class: What are you doing?

Player: I am (reading a book).

Places

Class: Where are you going?

Player: I am going to (the park)

Materials

picture cards

number cards (from a deck of playing cards)

How to play

1. Determine the order of play.

2. Shuffle one deck of playing cards (minus kings, queens, jacks, jokers, and aces), make two piles, and place them face down on the playing surface.

3. Place a picture card (vocabulary) between the piles of number cards. For example, if the picture card is ribbon, then the class asks the question: “What do you have?”

4. The first player answers, “I have (some ribbon)”. He then takes a number card from the pile; places the card in-front of him, but keeps it face down.

5. The second player takes his turn. The class asks the question again: “What do you have?” The second player answers: “I have (some ribbon).” He then takes a number card from the pile, places the card in-front of him, but keeps it face down. The third player takes his turn and does the same.

6. When all players have had their turns, the teacher calls: “Cards face up please!” or “Turn over your cards please!”

7. Players turn over their cards at the same time. The player with the highest number takes all the other number cards. If there’s a draw (two players with the same number), the two players are ask to take another card from the pile or do rock-scissors-paper, and the winner takes all the other cards. The game continues until there are no more number cards to turn over.

The winner is the player with the most number cards.

Marco Brazil has been training teachers and teaching children English for over fifteen years. He maintains strong a strong commitment to making English fun and easy for both teachers and learners. He occasionally writes articles and gives teaching presentations for Oxford Kid’s Club Teaching Tour mostly, on games (You can see handouts from his workshops here and here).  Marco is the director/owner of SmartKids Circle. You can find Marco on Facebook or follow him on his blog, Mabuhay Classroom.

Enhanced presentations

There are three main presentation uses I have for PowerPoint:

1. Supplementing the coursebook.

We’ve all been there – you are trying to get the students’ attention on the picture in the book to elicit some vocabulary or information before starting an activity… but some kids haven’t got their books out, others are on the wrong page and they can’t make out what you are pointing at from the back of the class anyway. Simple solution – scan the page, put the picture into your PowerPoint slideshow and circle/underline/highlight the things you want the class to focus on. No need to wait for everyone to find the same page – you already have them focused on a clear, large image.

2. Vocabulary Presentations

PowerPoint is great for presenting specific vocab – food, sports, animals, household objects… All you need is some clip art and text boxes. Sometimes real images can be more striking, as you can see is this example for animals:

Slideshows can also be made for new language topics. The best thing about these presentations is that they can be used again and again – no more trying to remember how you laid the board out last time you presented something!  The following presentation is one I made for the target structure ‘He/she is wearing…’ and main advantage of using it is that I no longer have to search for magazine pictures to use or struggle to draw figures with clothes on the board:

It’s also very easy to convert these slideshows into corresponding worksheets. Below you can see the same slideshow but with gapped sentences for the students to complete either while the slides are on the projector or afterwards as revision. I just print out enough copies and they can have the slides in their notebooks:

There are some important things to remember as you make your presentations though, especially when working with young learners:

• How does it look? pink and green may be your favourite colours but green text on a pink background will be difficult to read and may give you a headache! Choose your colours carefully and always check how the slides look on the projector screen before using them in class.
• Is the text readable? Again, check your slides on the screen from the back of the class before you use them. Also, don’t overcrowd your slides. If there is too much to look at, it will be difficult to follow.
• What age group are you teaching? Kids will like cute cartoony clip art but teenagers may not.
• Are the images clear? Most nouns are easy to present but clear images for adjectives or actions can be more difficult to find. The ‘tall’ figure on screen may come across as ‘man’, ‘teacher’ or ‘dad’ to your students.
• How long will it take? There’s nothing worse than a slideshow that seems like it will never end. Keep vocab presentations short and plan activities for students into your longer presentations.
• Will it really be better on PowerPoint? Before creating a slideshow, it’s always wise to ask yourself this question. A long time ago with my colleagues, I spent many hours trying to come up with a presentation for ‘There is/are’ but in the end, the ‘old way’ of using a big house poster proved to be much easier to prepare and to follow!

More than just a presentation tool

The above examples are all about presentations but there’s so much more that can be done with PowerPoint. Here are a couple of my ideas:

A whole lesson with PowerPoint!

As I said above, planning activities for students to do at specific points in your slideshow is important to avoid the lesson being entirely teacher-centred. Here is an example of one set of slides I have around which I base a whole lesson:

The animated penguins come in first and I ask the students to come up with descriptive sentences in pairs using what they see as prompts. I then reveal the sentences on the slide and we compare them to what they have written. After that, they see the squirrel and the sentences appear. Again in pairs or small groups, they decide which are true and which are false. They work together again to answer the questions about the lion before we come to the final slide which has some prompts for them to write about an animal of their choice. Just 4 slides but the activities last at least one entire lesson.

Guessing Games

I also make use of PowerPoint for some games to review language. Guessing games are my favourite. I put an image on the slide and then cover part of it with a shape and ask the students to guess what it might be. Another variation of this is a ‘Guess Who?’ style game in which I reveal sentences describing the person, animal or object one at a time and ask the students to guess who or what it might be. In this example, you can see some sentences about celebrities along with covered up photos. This one was a class favourite!:

But my very favourite example is this last one. Last year, a student of mine approached me during break and told me how much she liked the guessing games. She then produced a flash drive and said she had made her own slideshow and asked if she could present it to the class. Of course, I said yes and her classmates loved it:

We then started to have student-made slideshows on a daily basis and at the end of the year many of the class handed in their end of year projects (a factfile about themselves) on PowerPoint.

And that’s something worth remembering: however useful the tool for the teacher, it’s always more powerful in the hands of the learner.

David is an English teacher currently working in Ankara, Turkey and teaching young (primary school) learners. He is also a student doing the distance MA in Ed Tech & TESOL with the University of Manchester. You can follow David on his blog, and on Twitter.

Ask any Filipinos about Pukpuk Palayok or Hampas Palayok, and chances are they played it or saw it played at least once during their childhoods. The game is so immensely popular that any celebration or town fiesta is not complete without children (oh yes, sometimes adults) playing it. Having been colonized by the Spaniards for three hundred and thirty three years, Pukpuk Palayok is the Filipino version of Piñata, and just like the fiesta, Spaniards used the game to attract natives to their ceremonies and convert them to their religion. The Filipinos, known for reinventing things to suit their needs out of limited resources, adapted it by using a clay pot instead of the Mexican painted paper Piñata. In those times paper and paints were scarce and expensive, whereas clay pots were plentiful and cheap.

In the Philippines, pupok means to hit, and palayok is a clay pot, so the game literally means to hit a pot. Traditionally, the game is played with the decorated clay pot filled with goodies (candies, sweets, coins, and sometimes peso bills), suspended by string in the air, high enough for players to reach it. A long bamboo stick is used to hit and break the pot, so that players as well as by-standers can grab as many goodies as they can. The player who breaks the pot wins a prize, usually in currency.

Pukpok Palayok: Reinvented for EFL classrooms

For EFL classrooms, Pukpok Palayok uses no clay pot, nor a bamboo stick. Instead, the game makes use of the white board, picture cards (with magnets attached at the back), and an oversize hat (my children hate to be blindfolded with a handkerchief). In this adaptation, hitting is not permitted; children make use of their sense of directions, understanding of the commands given, and using their hands to feel for the targets. In my experience, the game works wonderfully for preschoolers, for teaching the alphabet, colors, shapes, fruits and vegetables. While, for elementary graders, it works very well for foods, practicing specific target language (“I’m hungry! What do you want? I want a hamburger. Go find it!” or “Where are you going? I’m going to the supermarket. Go find it”).  In addition to the target language, this is a great way to reinforce language for giving directions like; go straight, to your left, to your right, stop, that’s it, etc.

Target Language Examples

S1: I’m hungry!

Class : What do you want?

S1 : I want (hamburgers).

Class: Go find it!

***

Class: What’s for (lunch)?

S2: (Spaghetti) is for lunch.

***

Class : Where are you going?

S3 : I’m going to the (park).

***

Class: How are you going there?

S3 : I’m (riding a bicycle).

Class: Have fun!

Players

Two (2) or more (the more the merrier!)

Materials

picture cards

board

some magnets

a party hat (oversize) or blindfold

How to play

1. Determine the order of play.
2. In random, attach all the picture cards on the board.
3. Instruct the players to remember the placement of each card.
4. The first player takes his turn. He stands 12 steps (more is better) away from the board. The other players ask the question; for example, “What do you want? The first player answers “I want (a hamburger).” The other players answer back “Go, find it!”
5. The first player puts on the over size hat (covering his or her face), and turns around three times.
6. The other players give directions, starting with “Go straight!” “To your right!” “To your left!” etc. The aim is for the player to find the target by following directions given by other players.

Note : For large number of players, for example twenty (20) , it is best to group them into four (4) teams of five members each. One player will have to be blindfolded, while the other four members give the directions to find the target picture card.

Marco Brazil has been training teachers and teaching children English for over fifteen years. He maintains strong a strong commitment to making English fun and easy for both teachers and learners. He occasionally writes articles and gives teaching presentations for Oxford Kid’s Club Teaching Tour mostly, on games (You can see handouts from his workshops here and here).  Marco is the director/owner of SmartKids Circle. You can find Marco on Facebook or follow him on his blog, Mabuhay Classroom.