Lately I've been really into playing card games with my special needs students! A lot of them are just classics repurposed, but in the name of gathering resources, these are some I've found fun or useful.
Some of these I made cards for digitally, and some of them I just drew by hand. I put some suggestions for topics you can use them with, but they're pretty open-ended if you've got other ideas!
Satou desu. Suki na onigiri no gu wa ume desu.
-Players: 3+
-Topic: icebreakers, questions (very flexible!)
-Cards: hand drawn, although this is a licensed game so you could buy a deck. Each card has a question prompt on one side ("What ___ do you like?", "Can you ___?", "Summer or winter?", "I want this superpower", "I have __ siblings", etc) and a blank back.
-This is a Japanese party game and fun for an icebreaker or for prompting small talk! The game has two stages:
1) The group draws a card from the deck, and each player answers the question on it. Once all the players have answered, put that card face-down in the middle of the table. Repeat about 5-10 times, until a good little pile has formed.
2) One-by-one, players pick up a question card from the used pile in the center. Everyone then tries to remember how that player answered that question. So players A, B, C, and D all answer every the question in stage 1, and in stage 2 when player A picks up a question card, players B, C, and D all try to remember player A’s answer. The first person to get it right gets a point and keeps the card!
-We ran this one for the whole hour with 2 rounds (8 questions each) - if you wanted to use it as a warmup you could probably do a 4-question round in ~10-15 minutes!
Apples to Apples
-Players: 3+
-Topics: superlative adjectives, adjectives, vocabulary sets
-Cards: hand drawn - I wrote all the adjective cards and had my students help me draw the noun cards. It turned out really fun with a lot of random items and things relevant to them!
-We played this after studying comparative and superlative adjectives! The gameplay is the same as the party game (one player draws an adjective card and the rest put down a noun, then the first player decides which noun best fits the adjective - the smallest, the most beautiful, the most boring, etc). Not a new idea ofc but it was fun especially if your students like to draw!
-With some review of superlatives and some card-drawing time, this is easily a whole class period. You could also run it a couple rounds at a time.
Uno
-Players: 2+
-Topic: numbers
-Cards: attached
-Also classic. I made one deck of cards that goes up to 20, and one with tens places up to 100. I like to bring them with me in case a lesson runs short!
Go Fish
-Players: 2+
-Topics: numbers, vocabulary sets, verbs ("I want to...", "Can you..."), “Do you have…”
-Cards: attached, or a standard playing deck
-I made these cards to practice “I want to" phrases! Standard gameplay, but instead of asking “Do you have any…?”, they would say an “I want to…” sentence using the verb on the card. Some of the cards (i.e. “eat”, “play”) have a blank space that they’d fill in (i.e. “I want to eat ramen”). Iirc I tailored the cards around the verbs in this Choose Your Own Adventure powerpoint so they’d be familiar with them when we played it afterwards >> https://www.altopedia.net/activities/2357-late-for-school-if-i-were-you-i-would
Slamwich: posted here! >> https://www.altopedia.net/activities/2398-taste-slamwich