Put students into groups of 3-4. They don't have to move their desks— just move their chairs close to each other. One student starts with a pen in their hand. They say something in English to pass it to the next person as a timer counts down. When the timer ends, whoever is caught with the pen has to do a challenge.
Note: If the timer is shown, students might hold on to the pen and pass it at the last second. It works best if the timer is hidden but you can give them warnings (30 seconds, 10 seconds). Also, sometimes when I see a student consistently being stuck with the pen, I'll wait until they've passed it to call time, haha.
Anyway, this game consists of two parts— a topic and then "punishment". There's no preparation and you could even come up with different topics and punishments on the spot!
Topics can be anything, but I would suggest something that doesn't take a lot of complex thought since students are trying to think and say these as quickly as possible.
Examples that worked for me:
• likes and dislikes
• counting one higher
• vocabulary categories (animals, professions, colors, food, weather,...)
• verb of a specific form (present tense, past tense,...)
• things you do in different seasons
• things they did during vacations
Punishments are equally as flexible and can range from challenging grammar to silly things.
I usually allow the group to help the person caught with the pen.
Examples:
• new grammar
• writing a sentence on the board
• writing as many vocabulary words as possible on the board
• introduce yourself in English to your group
• drawing something on the board
• charades
• tell each group member a compliment
etc. etc.
Hope you enjoy!
Always a great activity and super flexible. Rather than use pens I'd suggest bringing in bean bags, soft balls or bunched up pieces of paper. Kids get a bit excited and you don't want them tossing other kids stuff around. The school might actually have rules against it. I've found 'punishments' largely unnecessary. The kids usually get enough of a kick out of the game.
cool website. I always use it for my ESL lessons.
Keep up doing the good work.
Thanks.
Thank you so much for sharing! I've been using this as warmup for all my classes.
Some more punishment ideas if you guys need them! Had students sing the chorus of Blank Space by TaySwift for their groups, had them use a sock puppet next round to give their answers, had students wear some cat ears and meow after each statment (next round), tongue twister recite for the group, speak in slow motion next round, baby voice next round, spell a difficult word, chopstick pick up/hand off of pen (or object next round).
For my advanced students, I made them start by the first person answering, What do you think of X? (1 full sentence)
But they had to then come up with the next question for the following person, what do you think of __________?
Then each person repeats answering the newly posed question and creating a new one. (This was a one minute round, for groups of 4 people)