How do you play?

How do you play? is a marvellous site with the instructions for a wide variety of educational and entertaining games which can be used  to practice and develop language skills.

The site divides the games into eight different types:

• Active games
• Board games
• Card games
• Classroom games
• Icebreakers
• Party games 
• Sports 
• Team building

Each game has some basic information about how long the game will take and what materials are needed, followed by clearly written instructions for how the game is played. You can also vote up or down the games you try.

There are quite a few games that you can use in the language classroom. Here are some of my favourites.

• Telephone charades
• Mine field
• Icebreaker questions (Good for 2nd conditional)
• Life timelines
• People bingo

How to exploit this site
This is a great resource to exploit with language learners and not just by playing the games with them.

• Get the students to read an entry then teach other students how to play the game.
• Get students to follow the model and create their own written game instructions for a game they know.
• Get students to read and select a game they would like to play.
• Copy the text of some instructions, cut them up and get students to organise them in the correct order to play the game (You can use Paragraphy to do this).
• Create a Wordle image of the game instructions and see if the students can use the words in it to recreate the instructions after they play the game.

Here's an example of telephone charades.

All learning starts with games and play, but a lot of the time that element of play gets lost as our children grow older and education becomes more of a serious process of cramming for exams. How do you play? has lots of materials that can be used to bring playful learning back into the classroom and make it a much happier and more language productive place.

I hope your students enjoy these activities.

Related links:

• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL
• Educational Games That Really Are Fun
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Games With a Purpose and a Social Network
• Create your own game
• Online Water Conservation Game

Best

Nik Peachey