Hangman: A popular game adapted to the ESL classroom.
In order to practice and drill most target language, you need some key vocabulary to support your sentences. I like to use Hangman as a whole class game in order to get a key theme or target word on the board. With this word on the board, you can start brainstorming related vocabulary as a class.
Rules:
You have probably played this game a thousand times. Use a word related to the day’s target. For example, with the “Do you like…?” lesson target, perhaps choose ‘sports’ as the word, and after finishing the game brainstorm different sports to put around the target word.
Variations:
You could start with a quiz-style activity and the team who answers the question gets to choose a letter and then guess the word. Perhaps a scoring system of 2 for a correct quiz answer, 2 for each letter guessed, and 5 for guessing the word.
NOTE: If you don’t think the traditional hangman picture is appropriate, you can choose other pictures. Perhaps you draw a police officer with a truncheon or get the students to choose an animal and you start drawing a part of the animal each time – one advantage of this is that you can keep adding lines (add a hat and some gloves, etc) so no team loses based on the drawing.
