Activity Bank
Read my lips! Beat the teacher!
Put the flashcards on the board and silently mouth a word.
The children try to read your lips. The first child to guess
the word mouths the next word.
What’s the word?
Hold a flashcard so that the children cannot see it. Describe
the word for the class to guess. For example, It’s an animal.
It can’t fly. It’s long. It hasn’t got any legs. (A snake)
Easy maths Call six volunteers to the front and ask them to stand in a line.
Stick the flashcards to the board and write a number under
each one. Say a sum, cycling plus tennis. The children add
the numbers and say the word they add up to, swimming.
This game can be played with addition (cycling plus tennis)
or subtraction (basketball take away football).
Posters
Memory quiz
The children study the poster for two minutes and try to
remember as much as possible. Turn the poster away and
ask questions about it: How many … are there? Where’s
the … ? What colour is the … ? Award points to teams for
correct answers.
Stand up, Sit down the story, winning points for their team with correct answers.
Write Yes = Stand up, No = Sit down, on the board. Display
the poster and make a sentence about it: The girl is wearing
green socks. If the sentence is correct, the children stand up.
If the sentence is wrong, the children sit down.
Which poster?
Put several posters around the classroom. Say a word
and ask the children to walk to or point to the poster
with that word.
Who am I?
Choose one of the people in the poster and tell the children
to ask questions to guess who you are: Are you running? Have
you got blue hair?
Guess the word
Divide the class into teams. Start to write a word from the
poster on the board, slowly, letter by letter. The teams put their
hands up to try and guess the word. The first team to guess
correctly wins a point and then can win a second point if they
can complete the word with the correct spelling.
Five minutes
Show the poster and ask the children to work in pairs
or small teams and write down all the words they can see
on the poster in a notebook. Give them five minutes,
then ask groups to count their words. The group with most
words wins.
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Choose a word from the poster, write it on a piece of paper
and keep the paper hidden from the class. Tell the class you
are thinking of a word from the poster and give them four
chances to guess the word: Is it the (helicopter)? If the class
guess the word in four guesses, then give them a point. If they
do not guess the word, show them the paper with the word
you chose and award yourself a point.
Whispers
Whisper a sentence about the poster to the first child in the
line (The cat is sleeping on the bed). That child then whispers
the sentence to the second child and so on. The last child in
the line goes to the poster and points to what they heard.
Narratives
Making mistakes
Check the children’s memory of the story by reading it out
with deliberate mistakes. You can ask them to call out when
they hear a mistake or to try and count the number of
mistakes they hear in the story.
Story quiz
Write a series of questions based on the story, then divide the
class into teams. Players take turns to answer questions about
Who am I?
Choose a volunteer. They are going to pretend to be a character
from a story. The others have to guess who they are by asking
yes/no questions. This works well as a team game. Write down
the number of questions needed to guess for each turn. At the
end, the team that asks the fewest questions are the winners.
What if... ?
You can really encourage the children to be creative by asking
them to think up alternative endings. This makes them think
about how stories work and also empowers them to make the
stories their own.
Character profiles
Encourage the children to think around the story more. Let them
choose someone from a story and write a character profile. Tell
them to start with all the information they can deduce from
the story and then ask them to invent information where there
is a gap. The new information should be based on what they
already know of the character. This is a very good exercise to
prepare them for writing their own original stories.
Before and after
Here’s another exercise to encourage thinking outside the
story. Divide the class into small groups or pairs and ask them
to think about what might have happened before the story
started or what will happen after the story finishes.
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