Beginning vocabulary: practice activities

A selection of activities to help young learners practise new vocabulary.

Pizzas | I went to market | Hangman | Pelmanisms | Bingo | Label the classroom

Pizzas

For food vocabulary and fun

• Give each student a paper plate and ask them to design their favourite pizza by drawing the things they most like onto it. You can show them your own example with e.g. cheese, tomato, ham, pineapple and chocolate!
• If they are pre-writers, they can tell you and each other what is on their pizza. If they are able to, they write the words of the ingredients next to them on the pizza. The ‘pizzas’ can be displayed on the classroom walls.

I went to market

For older students with a bigger bank of vocabulary and for all vocabulary, alphabet awareness and fun.

• Get students into a circle.
• Start by saying: ‘I went to market and I bought an apple’.
• The student to your right must repeat what you said and add another thing beginning with B.
• Keep going until the last student has to remember 26 things bought in market!

Hangman

A quick and effective way of getting students to revise spelling of previously introduced words. A great warmer at the start of a lesson.

• Think of a word students learnt last lesson e.g. mountain
• Draw eight dashes on the board – one for each letter of the word

– – – – – – – –

One at a time students guess which letters may be in the word. If they are correct the letter is added to the word:

’N’ = _ _ _ n _ _ _ n

If they guess incorrectly, the teacher draws one part of a hangman’s noose on the board

Students can guess the whole word at any time. But the teacher wins if the whole hangman is drawn before the word is guessed.

Pelmanisms

This is a great game for concentration, reading and meaning.

• • Picture of cat: Cat
  • Picture of dog: Dog
  • Picture of horse: Horse
  • Picture of pig: Pig
  • Picture of crocodile: Crocodile
  • Picture of lion: Lion
     

1. Prepare separate cards with words and pictures.
2. Spread them on the floor or table and ask children to match the words to the pictures. Once they have done this successfully turn all the cards over and jumble them up in groups of up to six.
3. Students take turns to pick up 2 cards and show them to everybody. If they get a picture and the word that goes with the picture they keep the cards, if their cards do not match they put them back where they find them.
4. Students must try to remember where the cards have been put down.

Bingo

To practise word recognition

Collate a list of 20+ words the students know well – they can recognise them in their written and spoken form and know the meanings. Either write the words on the board or hand out a list of the words to the students. Students must choose any 9 of the words and write them onto a piece of paper that looks like this:

tiger	blue	pen
pizza	ten	orange
chair	book	girl

Teacher chooses words form the list at random and reads them aloud. If the student has the word on their paper they cross it out. As soon as a student has crossed out three words in a line – up, down or diagonally – they shout Bingo! And are the winner.  

Label the classroom

Children learn from everything around them and need constant reinforcement of language. A fun way of reinforcing the written form of the words for classroom objects like door, board, window etc is to label them.

• Write the words on card and as you teach the words stick them to the appropriate object or get students to label the objects themselves.  
• One lesson jumble them up and get students to label them appropriately.