ESL Games for the Classroom

ESL Games for the Classroom by Michael Digiacomo is a great resource for interactive English classroom activities. This compact resource includes more than one hundred activities that don’t require much prep work. The color-coded book makes it easy to reference exactly the games you need based on the skills you are teaching. These activities include:

speaking
listening
writing & reading
vocabulary
spelling & number
grammar

Written by an experienced ESL teacher, ESL Games for the Classroom is easily adapted to different classroom scenarios, including small and large class sizes and even one-on-one lessons. The author ranks the games for difficulty, and includes a reference chart at the end of the book for quickly finding an appropriate activity.

As a teacher of online ESL classes, I am finding this book to be very useful. I can adapt many of the games to fit into a short time frame for extension activities. Each game is easy to implement and has a ‘recipe’ that includes the materials, prep work, and implementation ideas. These concise instructions make it a breeze to fill in extra time or give students a little extra help.

The best thing about ESL Games for the Classroom is that it provides fun ways to increase fluency among English language learners. Any time I can make my classes more engaging and fun while increasing my students’ language skills, I feel like I’m doing my job. ESL Games for the Classroom certainly makes these goals easier to maintain.