100 Games and Activities for the Introductory Foreign Language Classroom

Thierry Boucquey, Laura E. McPherson, Laura McPherson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317925606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Stimulating, engaging, and effective, the games and activites in this book offer your students alternatives to learning by rote or performing drills. This book makes it easy for you to develop their linguistic functions through active learning. The specific skills and vocabulary taught in each game or activity is highlighted, as are the easy-to-follow instructions, helpful charts, worksheets and other visuals.

1

Animals and Their Habitats

Animal Collage

Topic

♦ Animals and their habitats

♦ Verb to be (from)

Materials

♦ Plain white paper (1 sheet per student)

♦ crayons, pens, or markers

♦ A few large poster sketches of different animal habitats (rainforest, ocean, desert, forest, house, etc.)

♦ Tape

Objectives

To reinforce animal and habitat vocabulary through art while incorporating the verbs to be (from) or to live (in)

Instructions

Pass out pieces of plain white paper to the students. Ask them each to make a simple drawing of an animal, choosing from the animals they have studied in class. When the students are finished with their drawings, students individually come to the front of the room, hold up their drawings, and announce their animals and the habitats in which they live. For example, to use the verb to be (from), the student holds up the drawing of a frog and say, “The frog is from the rainforest.” After announcing this, the students tape their animals on the appropriate habitat poster. Continue until all the animals are in their appropriate habitats, creating a beautiful animal collage that can be displayed in the classroom or disassembled so the students can keep their animal drawings and label them.

Note

If there is not enough time for students to come up individually, call them up by habitat. For example, say, “All the animals of the ocean come to the front.” Then the students can still announce their animals but save time by not announcing the habitats.

Jungle Safari

Topic

♦ Animals

Materials

♦ Pictures of approximately five jungle animals

Objective

To learn about jungle animals

Instructions

Before class, tape the pictures in various places in the classroom. You are the tour guide and the students are tourists on this jungle safari. Lead them carefully around the room, as if stepping over vines and around trees, while the students try to spot the animals taped up around the room. Whenever they find a picture, the group circles it and repeats the animal’s name, making the total physical response (TPR) noises and associated movements.

Note

This can also be a desert safari, a mountain trek, a farm visit, and so on, depending on the target culture.

Sounds on the Farm

Topic

♦ Farm Animals and Their Sounds

Materials

♦ Animal cards (1 per student)

Objectives

To reinforce the farm animal sounds specific to the target culture and use animal vocabulary

Instructions

To create the animal cards, draw or print out small images of the animals, with many on each page and multiple copies of each animal. Cut the page(s) of animals so that each card has one animal on it. The perceived sounds of farm animals vary between languages and regions. Search the Internet for any target culture’s animal sounds that are unfamiliar.

After a lesson on farm animals and their sounds, pass out an animal card to each student. When the teacher asks, “What sounds do the farm animals make?” each student stands up and begins making the animal sound that corresponds to their animal. Students try to find their animal family by making their sound; for example, a chicken make its sound to find all the other chickens. When the animals have grouped into their families, the teacher tells the animals to stop making their sounds. The teacher asks each family one at a time, “What sound do you make? What animal are you?”

Examples

In our Spanish class, the students who received a rooster animal card made the sound, quiri quiri quiri, but each language had its own variation of the rooster sound: cock-a-doodle-doo (English), cocorico (French), kokekokkoo (Japanese), kickeriki (German), kukru:ku: (Hindi), kukelekuu (Flemish).

Note

Make sure the students keep their animal card hidden once they start making sounds so that they cannot cheat by showing it to the other students.

Trouble on the Animal Farm

Topic

♦ Animals

Objective

To gain an understanding of the types of animals found within a country that speaks the target language

Instructions

Have the students sit in a circle. Modeling the game Duck-Duck-Goose, students play either the part of an escaped animal or the farmer trying to corral the animal back to the farm. Choose a student to begin the game by standing up and choosing an escaped animal to play. Next, have the remaining seated students in the circle make that animal’s sound. After they have all made the sound, the animal begins to walk around the circle saying the animal name when touching a sitting student on the head. On reaching the student selected to be the farmer, the animal must then call out the name for farmer and make it back to the farmer’s seat in the circle without being tagged by the farmer. The student playing the farmer could also be a zoo keeper, rancher, explorer, or si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Animals and Their Habitats
• 2 Body Parts and Clothing
• 3 Colors and Numbers
• 4 Commands and Directions
• 5 Culture
• 6 Date and Time
• 7 Family and the Home
• 8 Food
• 9 Language
• 10 Personal Descriptions
• 11 Weather, Travel, and Geography
• 12 Review (Any Topic)
• Index