Activities to Kick off the School Year

Vocabulary review – A game of Jeopardy

If you’ve never played a game of Jeopardy with your ESL students, you have no idea what you’re missing! It’s an incredibly flexible game, adaptable to any content, whether it is grammar or vocabulary that you wish to review or practice. In this case, we’ll see an example of how to create a game of Jeopardy to review basic vocabulary.

Setup: 
Divide the chalkboard or whiteboard into 5 columns with 6 rows. On the first row choose a category for each column, for example: Fruits, Vegetables, Animals, Clothes, Colors; for the remaining rows give each box a certain number of points. It should look like this:

Fruits	Vegetables	Animals	Clothes	Colors
10 pts	10 pts	10 pts	10 pts	10 pts
20 pts	20 pts	20 pts	20 pts	20 pts
30 pts	30 pts	30 pts	30 pts	30 pts
40 pts	40 pts	40 pts	40 pts	40 pts
50 pts	50 pts	50 pts	50 pts	50 pts

Prepare 5 questions for each category. You may choose to do so in the Jeopardy format: I am red and I grow on trees. Answer: What is an apple?

Speaking activities - What can you say about me?

Ask students to bring 5 or 6 things to class, including: a piece of identification (if possible, passport or driver's license); a family photo; a favorite book or magazine; a toy or collectible, etc... Bring some items of yours as well. Each student displays his or her items on the teacher's desk, and fellow classmates say whatever they can about the person's family, hobbies, likes and dislikes, etc...