Activate Manual

Instructions
1. Have students (the players) sit in pairs or small groups, and give each team about 50 
Word Bricks
.
2. Tell the teams that they will have 2 minutes to find as many words in their set of 
Word Bricks
that are in the selected category. (The time limit can be adjusted for 
larger sets of 
Word Bricks
or for the more challenging word categories.)
3. Call out the word category and immediately start the timer. Alternatively, the teach-
er may need to give some examples of the word category to help players know what 
to look for.
4. At the end of 2 minutes, have each team call out how many 
Word Bricks
they found 
in their set of 
Word Bricks
.
5. To play more than one round, call out a new category and repeat steps 3–4.

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Activate: Games for Learning American English
DIY! (DO-IT-YOURSELF)
Activate: Games for Learning American English
comes with 140 double-sided 
Word Bricks
for a total of
280 words. (See page 109.) To maintain the collection of bricks, teachers should carefully collect the 
bricks after each use so that they can be used in future activities. However, it is easy to add to the col-
lection. 
Word Bricks
can be created to include:
•
 
words about everyday events or activities that students may want to discuss
• new vocabulary items from textbooks or other course materials
• new words that come up in class discussions
• function words that are needed to create certain grammatical structures, like 
than
for compari-
sons, 
there
for constructions like “
There are two books.
,” and so on.
Teachers may want to keep a small section of the board available for vocabulary that comes up in 
discussions or lessons and use this list when adding to the 
Word Bricks
collection. It is important to add 
many function words to the collection as well so that students will have enough of these ‘small’ words 
to connect the vocabulary words into complete sentences. For example, teachers will likely need to 
add additional copies of these functions words as the collection grows:
•
 
articles and quantity words (
a/an, the, this, these, that, those, some, many, few,
etc.)
• auxiliary verbs that are used to form complex verb phrases (e.g., all forms of 
be, have, 
and 
do
)
• negative particles (e.g., 
not, no
)
• modal verbs (e.g., 
can, could, may, might, will, would, should, 
etc.)
• prepositions (e.g., 
in, on, with, for, from, by, against, along,
etc.)
• clause markers (e.g., 
to, that, because, since, when,
etc.)
As you add to your collection, it is a good idea to keep a list of all of the words that are added to the 
class’s collection of 
Word Bricks
, especially for games like 
Brick Bingo
and 
Word Category Bingo
. 
MATERIALS
All 
Word Bricks
do not need to be made of the same materials. They do 
not even need to look like bricks. Whatever material 
Word Bricks
are made 
from, their name reflects their use for building—which is what students 
do with 
Word Bricks
. Teachers can use anything that can be written on. 
Pieces of paper will work, but thicker objects will be easier to handle 
and more fun to build sentences with. Some materials that can be used 
include the following: cardboard cut from boxes, flat stones, large un-
cooked beans, rectangular erasers, smooth pieces of wood, shells from 
the seashore, walnut shells, pumpkin seeds, or plastic building blocks. 
Plastic building blocks (pictured in the top left corner) have four smooth sides that can be written on. 
A