Here’s a game to play with “too cool to sing” 12 year olds (or older), that gets them wanting to try more ….
After you’ve taught the words and gone through the song once…
1. Give each student an A4 picture card.
2. As the song plays if you hear your card you hold it up in the air.
3. Play the song again.
4. This time the teacher picks a “volunteer” who comes to the front.
5. Everyone hides their cards!
6. As the song is playing the volunteer has to try and remember who has which card and point to the correct person as their (hidden) card is said in the song!
7. They hold up their card if pointed to correctly.
8. Keep trying again with different volunteers until someone gets all the cards right!
It’s a nice little twist, but at least gets them listening and talking amongst themselves as they try to remember who has what. The adrenaline pump from being at the front really makes a difference!
If you have small classes then this game works for any theme, but for large classes then the Trick or Treat is a good choice as you have 24 picture cards (i.e. “Scarecrow” and “Scarecrow Soup”) and you can make other cards for “trick”, “or”, “treat”, “Yes”, “please”, “no” & “thank you” to bring the total anything up to 31 kids!
Earn More From Your Passion For Teaching English!
If you’ve got a small enough class, I could see this working well with the original Halloween song – “Look, there’s a witch!”etc.
Julian-k,
did you change anything with the link to your site?
Before I could enter, but since last week I get an alarm not to open it, because there is the risk that it breaks my computer?!
Richard, thanks for another brilliant idea. I will try it today with
“Your the best”, having kids have different adjectives each.
In school with a big class I think I’ll go for the breakfast song.
It should be great for either kids who don’t want to sing, but also for songs that are too difficult with one or two lessons.
Great idea for older kids! Not childish or too easy, yet not too hard, it’s just right!