Pass The Bomb

Level: Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced.

Skills: speaking.

Topic: vocabulary.

Materials: slips of paper, small item (an eraser or a pencil).

Time: 10 to 20 minutes.

This game works great with vocab-recap.

Cut out slips of paper with topics on them (e.g. nouns starting with F, things found in a circus, irregular verbs in past participle, city facilities, genres of fiction….). Divide students into groups of four, and give each group a set of topics. Each group also has a small item (e.g. an eraser or a pencil; if you can, a small rubber ball is excellent for this game) that can be passed around between them. 

Start the timer on your cell phone and call out ’start’. A student in each group now picks up a topic from the pile and says one word connected to this topic. As soon as a relevant word has been said, the student passes on the small item to the student next to him/her. This student now has to say a new word, pass on the item and so on. 

The student with the item in his/her hand when you call out ’stop (after appr. 30-45 seconds), gets a point, and in this game, you don’t want to get points. If all the students of the group have said their words, after the allotted time, the group gets no point.

It's amazing how feverish competitive this game gets and how deeply involved the students become.