Collection of games

Level: elementary

Age: young children

Group size: whole class or groups

Every learner has a number of cards, each bearing a letter clearly visible anywhere in the room. Each team can have cards of one colour, different from the other teams’ colours. The letters which occur most often in printed English are e, a, t, o, i, s, h, d, l, and r, and each learner should have plenty of these; nobody should be given only letters of low frequency.

Think of a word (not too short) and ask for certain of the letters in it. Place the learners who have these letters in order, but leave gaps for the letters missing. The class has to guess the word and those with the missing letters then come forward to fill the gaps. Thus if the letters provided are i, r, and one f, and the correct guess giraffe is made, the teacher says Yes, good, it is giraffe, and shows a picture of one. Now, what is the first letter? Right, ‘G’. Who has a ‘G’? Harry, you were first. Come here. Where are you going to stand? All right. What is the next letter? Is it ‘A’? No, ‘A’ doesn’t come next. Where does ‘A’ come? Yes, Peter, stand next to ‘F’, and so on. The letters are not necessarily taken in sequence.
Word-completion