Coutesy: Nikhila, Sanjana, Niikhil, elma, rocky and TTF)

1, Using flash cards: Flashcards are great tools to teach Vocab. They are basically cards with pictures of objects. They are bright and colorful and will appeal to most children. You can use them to play games and most children will enjoy being able to touch and move the cards.

You can make your own flash cards based on the theme and the words that you are going to teach o that particular day, else you will find lots of flashcards to download and print online by just searching “Download Flash Cards” Some Flash cards would also be available in the orphanage library.

Flash cards can be used in many interesting ways. Do check out the Flash card games page in the MAD Blog to find a few.

2. Charades / Pictionary: Charades can be used as a refresher for words that have already been taught to the children. Give one student a word and ask him / her to describe the word to the other through actions / drawing. This can be made more fun by dividing the group into teams.

3. Ask the kids to sit in a circle and introduce their friend with a good quality their friend has. And the next round ask them to confess a bad quality they have. (works with girls, they are very curious to know what English word describes their bad quality).

4. A game (like the one in Kuch kuch hota hai)… u say some noun and immediately ask the kid to a say a word describing it. It has to be done very fast. (preferably sitting in a circle). E.g.: if u say rose, u may get red, if u say cake then sweet.

5. Cut out pictures of things, people etc. preferably, color pictures with some characteristics. Then ask the kids to describe the picture. E.g.: if it’s a picture of a garden, they may say beautiful, colorful etc; if a person, tall, short, fat etc…

6. Write some nouns in a chit of paper (e.g.: tree, house, flower, shoe etc). let each child pick a chit and then ask them to describe the word they got so that the others may guess. This activity not only brings more nouns into their vocab, but while describing, they also end up using many verbs and adjectives.

E.g.: if the word on the chit is cake, they may say” we eat it”, “it is sweet, soft etc….

7. Simon says: is a great game to teach Verbs. The teacher says many verbs like: Simon says run, Simon says Sit down etc. The kids should follow the instructions only if She say’s Simon says before the verb. If the teacher simply says “Run in a Circle” then the kids should stand still and do nothing. Else the kid is out. Great way to introduce new verbs

8. King Solomon: It’s a fun kinesthetic activity to teach the names of things in the room.  King Solomon will say he wants some particular thing and the kids must run around and get it for him. The first kid who gets it would be the winner. This can be used in our activities by making small picture cards of some words that you are teaching for the day and scatter it around in the room. King Solomon wants a watermelon and the kids must run around and find the watermelon card and return it to the teacher.

9. Blank DUNK: Here the idea is to make it interesting for the kids to do Fill in the blanks. A basket or a box is kept in the centre of the table. The class is divided into two teams and each team is given a chance to shoot. Each dunk gets a point. But here the catch is that they get to shoot only if the answer the question right. The question could be a fill in the blank, or a description of something, anything as long as it does not take too much time.

10. JIGSAW PUZZLE: Same as the above activity. You cut 2 pictures of a supercar or something your kids would love to have into 5 or 6 pieces.  Then ask questions to each team and for each correct answer they’ll get a piece of the puzzle. The team that completes wins.

11. Trash: This would be a great way to help kids understand the difference between words and sort them based on their attributes. First you need to draw four circles each for the two teams.  Name the four circles the four attributes that you chose to teach the Vocab. Then make two sets of chits with all the words that you taught them. Now in 1 mins time they should be able to sort all the words into their appropriate attributes. The most correct entry wins!! This is a great revision activity.

12. Memory Game: You can make small cards with the pictures of the words you are going to teach them that day. And on similar cards write the name of the words. One memory game can be played by 2 to 4 people MAX. So if you have more kids you’ll need to make multiple memory cards. The game is very simple. All cards would be arranged in such a way that their content is not visible. One player can lift 2 cards at a time. If the two cards are the same. Then he gets to keep them. The kid with the highest number of cards wins