Group word games esl

This game works a bit like a crossword: each puzzle has seven clues, seven mystery words, and 20 tiles that include groups of letters. This classic word-building game is hugely popular, and you can play against your Facebook or Twitter friends, or against a random opponent. It works just like Scrabble, where you have seven letter tiles and add them to a board. What if you want a writing-related game you can play while taking a break at your computer?

All of these are games that you can play in your browser: some involve a lot of writing and are essentially story-telling apps, whereas others are essentially digital versions of traditional pen and paper games. Unless otherwise noted, these games are free. This is a digital version of Hangman, which we covered above. You choose a category for words e. In Word Wipe, you swipe adjacent tiles including diagonals to create words, a bit like in Boggle.

Since the easiest words to create are short, simple ones, this is a great game for children or for adults who want to get better at spelling. As you might expect, this is a crossword game! It looks very much like a traditional crossword, and you simply click on a clue then type in your answer. The clues are straightforward rather than cryptic, though probably not easy enough to make this a good app for children or for English learners. You lay out your story as different cards and create connections between them.

Like Twine, Storium is designed to help you tell stories … but these stories are written in collaboration with others. You can either join a story as a character within it, or you can narrate a story — so this is a great game for building lots of different big-picture fiction-writing skills. This game combines a fantasy RPG setting where you fight monsters, get loot, gain levels and so on , with word games to play along the way.

It could be a good way to encourage a reluctant young teen writer to have fun playing with words — or you might simply enjoy playing it yourself. This game is an interactive story, told in the form of letters epistolary. The graphics are gorgeous — playing the game is like turning the pages of a book.

Writing Challenge can be used alone or with friends, creating a collaborative story by racing against the clock. You can use it as an app on your phone, as well as on your computer, so you can add to your stories at any time. Plot Generator works a bit like Mad Libs: you select a particular type of story e. The website creates the finished piece for you. There are also options for story ideas essentially writing prompts , character generators, and much more on the site.

Some of the options, like Fairy Tale, are great to use with young children — others may not be so suitable, so do vet the different options first. You can make choices about what Dan should do to reach his goals in different areas of his life — and the decisions you make affect what happens next in the game. Typing might seem like an odd thing to include on a list of writing games. While most people find that their typing does naturally improve with practice, these games are all quick ways for you or your kids to get that practice in a fun way.

Obviously, all of these games should help to improve typing skills: those which involve whole words may also help with spelling and vocabulary. This game is designed to teach children touch type type without looking at the keyboard. Other letters are gradually added in as the game progresses. In the game, you type the letters that appear on chameleons that are trying to catch a spider the chameleons disappear when you hit their letter.

The spider keeps rising up into a tree, and if it safely gets there, you move on to the next level. This is a competitive typing game where you race a car against friends or total strangers by typing the text at the bottom of the screen. Older children might enjoy it, and any adults with a strong competitive streak! TypeRacer is similar to NitroType: you control a racing car and the faster you type, the faster your car moves.

You can practice on your own, enter a typing race, or race against your friends if you prefer. If you create an account and login, other users can see your username, score, average speed and so on — and they can also send you messages. In this game, you destroy ghosts by typing the word on them. The graphics are pretty rudimentary, though it is a free game and a good way to practice quickly typing words. In this game, you type cooking-related words usually types of equipment. It involves single words and a few double words with a space between at the early levels.

This is a fun typing game aimed at young kids, so it starts with the fundamentals. You start by building a keyboard from letter blocks, then learn how to spot letters on the keyboard quickly before learning where those letters are located.

Teachers or parents might be interested in reading about why the game starts with mapping the keyboard. Again, this can help you with your typing speed and accuracy. Word scrambles make great games for English class, and adults enjoy these language brain teasers as well. Simply mix up the order of the letters and ask players to unscramble and identify the original words.

To make your own word scrambles, use an online letter randomizer. Scrabble is one of the most popular word games for adults or children. Players must use letter tiles to assemble words on the game board. More challenging letters have higher point values. For example, E is one point, while Z is ten. To find the point values for each tile and read more gameplay tips, check out this guide from Hasbro. To coordinate the game for language lessons, assign higher scores for vocabulary words, and ask players to use the words in a sentence for extra points.

Scrabble is easy to play online, too, making it one of the best digital vocabulary games. To play virtually, simply find a multiplayer online version of the game, such as Words With Friends. Scattergories is one of the most fun and simple word games for adults. The game challenges players to think up words all starting with the same letter. Alliterative phrases count for double or triple points. If two players have the same answer, then they must cross it out and neither receives points.

Of course, a player will not receive points for blank answers either. At the end of each round, the player with the most points wins. You could create more inventive categories for the game, or challenge players to make up prompts. To play virtually, use the chat, screen-share, whiteboard functions in your virtual meeting platform. You can also share a Google Doc or Form, or join a multiplayer online Scattergories game together. Tree or Bob Ross is a fun video conference game that challenges players to guess a word by asking questions.

The player who conjures the word is The Post. The Post answers This or That questions whose answers help players narrow down the word. For instance, a rose is probably more like a tree, but Pinnochio presents an interesting challenge. Each turn, the guesser adds a new word. For more excitement, introduce a time limit, or award more points if players guess the word during earlier rounds.

Pyramid challenges players to guess words from context clues. The pyramid is a collection of six words, arranged with three on the bottom, two in the middle, and one at the top. To win, teams must guess all words within the pyramid in the allotted time. When determining the time limit, consider the age of your players and the difficulty of the words. In general, 30 seconds per word, or three minutes total, is a good place to start, but add or take away time to increase or decrease the challenge.

Invisible Bridge is similar to six degrees of Kevin Bacon. In both games, you must figure out a way to connect two seemingly distant concepts.

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon uses actors, while Invisible Bridge uses words. One fun aspect about this game is there can be more than one correct answer, and opposing teams can dispute far-reaches. Invisible bridge encourages players to think about the nature of language and the relationship between words. For extra fun, turn other players into judges by asking them to rate the poems by holding up scorecards. The rules of Memory are easy: flip over two cards at a time and look for matching pictures or words.

When players find pairs, they take the cards off the board. The player with the most pairs of cards at the end of the game wins. Synonym Memory puts a challenging spin on the simple game. Instead of hunting for exact matches, players pair up words with synonyms. The game encourages players to think in different ways, as participants will need to remember the location of the cards as well as consider meanings of words.

For further inspiration, use a random word generator or consult online lists of difficult or intersecting words. These word games minimize frustration by disguising language lessons in the form of an exciting challenge. Not to mention, simple word games are fun for adults and kids alike, and make great icebreaker activities during meetings.

Most games only require words and a way to share them, so playing word games online via Zoom or similar platforms is easy. For even more smart fun, check out our posts on problem solving games , question games and team building brain teasers. Vocabulary games are word and language games you can play with students, coworkers, or family and friends. These games challenge players to hunt for words or definitions, brainstorm terms, deduce phrases based on clues, or create words under certain conditions.

Language games are a great way to teach new vocabulary and help students practice recognizing and using new words. By using virtual meeting software like Zoom, you can play any word game online.

Some good virtual vocabulary games include Scrabble, Scattergories, and online crossword puzzles. If you have more time however, you could ask the teams to prepare words and definitions themselves first. They could even include example sentences for each option. Many of the above games are well-suited to vocabulary practice, but what about grammar?

The great thing about Jeopardy is you can use it with almost any language topic, and its adaptability makes it the ideal choice for a review class. Simply choose five topics your class has studied recently, and write five questions related to each of them. Each question in a topic category is worth a different number of points; teams choose a category and points value which reveals their question, and are awarded that number of points if their answer is correct. Many of the segments they use are great fun to play in class, and work particularly well as warm-up activities.

Perhaps the most popular is Password, a game in which students guess vocabulary words from single-word clues. This game is played with two or three teams, and one student from each team sitting at the front facing away from the board.

Write or project a word on the board — our interactive Password game has suitable pre-prepared words you can use. In this game students silently mouth words or phrases to their teammate s. Our interactive Whisper Challenge game allows you to do this, and even plays background music to mask any whispered sounds. It might just seem like a bit of fun, but the game actually practises an important skill. Lip-reading is a significant element of interpreting speech, especially in noisy environments.

The student mouthing the word also practises enunciating clearly and correctly. Instead of just recognising vocabulary words, this exercise requires students to put together coherent sentence descriptions, great for practising fluency. On the TV show players are shown a strange object in secret, which they can choose to describe truthfully, or invent a different description. In the classroom we simply replace these strange objects with random pictures, shown to a student at the front on the computer.

You could source your own images, but the easiest way to play is using our Box Of Lies generator. As students are describing a picture, the game also doubles as a way to practise that skill, including the correct use of prepositions. When students have finished their description, their classmates have to guess whether they were describing truthfully, or inventing something completely different. Vocabulary category games are really popular with any age group, and perfect as a no-prep warmer.

Perhaps the most well known of these games is Scattergories. In the original version, players have to complete twelve categories with a single word all beginning with a predefined letter. We prefer a variation in which students work in small teams to complete three categories with as many words as they can. The team with the most valid words in a given category wins a point for that round. In that case the game Stop is more suitable, because students race to think of only one word in each category with six categories this time.

As in Scattergories, students draw category columns on a piece of paper. Some good categories to use include animals , clothes and accessories , sports and hobbies and jobs. Students then swap papers and score points for each word written. Our last category game is one that never fails to go down well, Name Ten.

In each round students think of ten words in one vocabulary category in one minute, without any specified first letter. The key feature though is an element of the original Scattergories game, in which only unique answers are worth a point.

This is great because students have to think of multiple words, but are also rewarded for more obscure vocabulary.