Classroom Pictionary - ESL Activity

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ESL Classroom Activity - Fun English Games Classroom Pictionary Activity

Pictionary is a great game that is perfect for adapting into a classroom English activity. There are a number of different ways to play but the following is what worked best for me and my ESL classes in Japan.

Make 4 sets of 10 cards (4 sets of 5 is fine if you don't feel you need so many), set 1 is for easy words, set 2 for medium, set 3 for difficult and set 4 for very difficult. Write words of your choice on the cards depending on the level of the students you teach.

I tended to use objects for the easier categories and ramped it up to verbs and adjectives for the more difficult categories. Here are some examples of the words I used:

Easy: book, car, tree

Medium: movie, snow, light

Difficult: open, shout, slow

Very difficult: surprise, clean, throw

Split the class into around 4 or 5 groups and have a student from the first group come up and choose a category, with 1 point on offer for a successful 'easy' drawing up to 4 for a successful 'very difficult' drawing.

Once the student sees the word they have 1 minute to draw on the blackboard, remembering to follow Pictionary rules such as giving no verbal clues and not drawing letters and numbers. The remaining students in the team try to guess the word (while the rest of the class stay silent).

Continue the process with the other teams while keeping track of the scores. To spice things up a little feel free to let other teams guess the word if the original team are unsuccessful in their 1 minute, giving them the chance to take each other's points.