An activity that can be used as a warmer, to revise vocabulary or for the teacher to check students’ vocabulary range on a certain topic.

Procedure

  • Ask your students to stand in a circle. Choose a soft object such as a small ball or soft toy that would be easy for the students to catch.
  • The teacher calls out a topic, for example, ‘animals’ and the ball is thrown at students at random. 
  • The student who catches the ball has to say a word belonging to that category in a few seconds (the teacher decides on the time according to students’ levels). 
  • If the student fails to say the word or says a word which has been already said, they sit down and are out of the game.

You can make this more complicated by changing the topics without warning or by asking the students to say the next word using the last letter of the last word said.

Topics