Fast, Fun, No-Prep Speaking Activity for Your ELLs

Duration: 5 minutes

Type: Partners

Overview of This Easy, Go-To ELL Activity

It’s a little like Turn & Talk, but with a goofy little twist of adding Rock, Paper, Scissors. Students practice a target grammar structure or sentence stem pattern by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors and then choosing a sentence for the other student to say. You can provide pictures to describe, example answers, and/or sentence stems to help guide student responses.

What You Will Need for This Speaking Activity

1. Target Sentence Pattern or Grammar Structure
2. Pictures, Example Answers, and/or Sentence Stems to Help Guide Student Responses

Step-By-Step Guide to this Speaking Activity for ELLs

1. After practicing the sentences of a grammar pattern (as in the Kid-Inspired speaking grammar pages), put students in partners. 
2. See this article for how to start with the Kid-Inspired Grammar Speaking pages.
3. If you are using Kid-Inspired materials, then cover the answers on the speaking grammar page, fold them under, or cut them off entirely.
4. Students play Paper, Scissors, Stone (or Rock, Paper, Scissors or Hunter, Gun, Bear or whatever you like).
5. The student who wins chooses a picture for the other student to say a sentence for. Students can say the example sentence if they remember or make up their own using the same structure.
6. If the student makes a mistake, that student has to do 5 jumping jacks before he or she is allowed to look at the answers to help him or her remember.

Benefits of This Activity

• This activity is fast and requires no preparation, so you can use it any time you want to get students practicing a bit on their own, like when you want to help out a student or two who are struggling.
• Adding in a get-out-of-your-seat and move activity gets the blood flowing and makes it more fun. You can have them do jumping jacks any time they lose for more exercise.
• Students become more fluent with the sentence structure, having said sentences using that structure so many times. Students need to be making 100s of sentences with a particular structure, not 1 or 2, to really get it in their systems so they use it without thinking about it.

Have you tried this activity? How did it go? Leave your comments below!