5 basic & fun games to engage your Chinese students
1. Badminton game This game is good for reviewing target vocabulary (words or communicative expressions). Set a "court" in the classroom by placing a skip-rope tied up to two chairs. Make two teams (the other students can be the crowd and/or challengers). Give each student a racket. Inflate a balloon (this will be the badminton birdie). Remember: the younger the students, the bigger the balloon must be (so it’s slower). Decide who serves first and for every winning shot the winning team calls out the flashcard or picture card shown by the teacher to get a point. Lots of fun! (NOTE: be careful since they might hit the others' faces when playing).
2. Category Tag game Choose a category (such as food, weather, transportation, etc.). The students should run around the room while the teacher chases them. When the teacher tags a student, the student must name a word from the category (e.g. food: cheese, fish, bread, etc.). You can give a time limit to answer (e.g. 5 seconds). If the student cannot answer or says a word that has already been used s/he sits out until the next round.
3. Whispers Also known as Chinese Whispers, this basic game is a fun energizer for your class in China. It works with adults as well as it does with kids. Break the class up into teams of about eight students. Ask them to line up. Whisper a sentence into the ear of the first student in each team. That student then needs to whisper the same sentence to the next student in their team, and so on. The last student should say the sentence out loud to the class. If it’s correct, the team wins a point.
Chinese students are happy to play for points. The sentence should be 100% accurate to get the point. After each game, get the students to shuffle their order. This mixes things up and ensures that different people are speaking out loud to the class. 4. Card Collection Give each student three cards. Each card has a question on it. Here are some example questions for an elementary class: ·Where are you from? ·What is your favorite animal? ·How do you spell China? ·Can you swim? Students walk around the classroom and find a partner to ask a question to. The students should then do ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to either keep or lose the card. Put a timer on this game, and closely monitor the students as they mill around, especially if they’re young. The student with the most cards wins. You could also get the students to say "one, two, three" each time they do rock, paper, scissors. 5. Tic Tac Toe Kids love this game and it’s easy to set up – hardly any prep time is required. Split the class into two teams. Ask everyone to line up and have them come up to the front when it’s their turn. The Tic Tac Toe board will have a sentence that they have to answer, or a picture that they have to identify by saying it out loud.
Tic Tac Toe is a simple yet great game to engage your Chinese students. If they get it correct they can write an ‘X’ or an ‘O’ on that spot. You then call a student from the other team. When the team gets a complete line (say, three or four squares long), they win a point. The first team to five points wins. Let the games begin! Like any activity you run in your Chinese classroom, student talk time should be maximized. Games are a great way to achieve this. Just remember to stay in charge and not let a game get out of hand. If it does, you can take points away or stop the game and resume it later. I hope you have lots of fun in your classroom in China! What do you think of these basic, fun games to engage your Chinese students? Do you have any great games that have worked in your classroom?
