Rock Scissor Paper Game
Are you looking for some fun ESL activities and games to incorporate into your classes? Then you’ve come to the right place! I’m going to give you the fun-down on one of my favourite review activities that works equally well for kids or adults.
More Details about this Rocks-Scissor-Paper Activity
Skills: Reading/ Speaking/ Listening
Time: 20 minutes
Level: Beginner-Intermediate
Materials Required: Question/Answer papers (~5/student)
What you Need To Do
Make up strips of paper with questions and answers (on separate papers). I usually do this by making up a grid, about 20 x 2. Then, write the corresponding questions/answer. Print out 1-5 copies (depending on the size of your class), cut the pieces out, and put them into a big envelope.
Quick tip: you can reusable these papers for other classes if you teach the same thing multiple times. Just get the papers back from the students at the end of the activity.
In class, give each student 5 random papers, a mix of both questions and answers.
They have to walk around the class finding their “match.” They can do this by talking quietly with each other, or reading the papers of the other person.
Once they find a match, they can rock scissor paper and the winner takes both papers. The students with the most points at the end of the allotted time are the winners. 2 papers (question/answer) counts as 1 point.
This is the perfect game to do for review in basic conversation classes before the midterm or final exam.
Teaching Tips for Rock-Scissor-Paper
This game has the potential to become a little bit wild if you don’t set up some ground rules at the start! Picture 20 students running around the classroom screaming in their native language. It’s not ideal.
Here’s how you can avoid this:
- Make a rule about no shouting. Each student must talk 1-1 with another student (no groups or teams). If anyone is not following this rule, they will have to sit down until the activity is finished.
- It’s best to make matches that are not too similar to each other. They should be quite obvious because if not, you’ll end up with all sorts of incorrect pairings at the end of the game (and students won’t be able to find the correct matches because of this).
- At the end of the game, you can review some of the most important questions/answers that you want to highlight before your test, or that needs to be emphasized before moving on to new material.
Need Another Review Activity?
If you’d like some more ideas for review games and activities for your classes, then check out this short video below about using board games in your classes.
Many of the teacher’s resource books include them, or it’s very easy to make your own. They’re fun, students love them and they also make an excellent review activity before a test.
Have your Say!
What are your thoughts about this fun ESL review game? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.
