How do you keep your students engaged in their favorite activity; gaming, while also engaged in your favorite thing – learning?
For some middle school students, books and schoolwork are something of a chore, and games are something to get engrossed in for hours at a time.
What are Language Arts Activities?
Improving grammar skills and learning English in all its many peculiarities becomes fun when we incorporate interactive games into learning.
1. Charades
Both middle school and elementary school students will have a blast playing this fun game of charades. Write vocabulary words on individual sheets of paper and place them in a box. Divide the class into teams, and have your kids pick the pieces of paper one at a time and act out the words to have their classmates guess what the words are.
15-30 minutes of this engaging game will give your students the much-needed brain break while they still learn.
Learn more: Get Charades Ideas
2. Balderdash
Even if you don’t have a board game, your school students can still play Balderdash. Divide your class into four groups and have them write five words from the dictionary on individual slips of paper. Place the pieces of paper in each team’s bowl.
The game is simple to play and fun; one team member reads out a word from the bowl and their team members write down what they think the word means – encourage your students to be as silly and creative as they can be with the writing prompts. The reader gets to select the team member who had the best definition.
Learn more: Ultra Board Games
3. Reading Bingo
Include some interactive language arts games and grammar activities in your lesson plan to make learning fun. Create fun Bingo cards and keep students motivated with exciting prizes to be won.
Learn more: On Our Minds Scholastic Blog
4. Mr. Nussbaum Language Art Games
Mr. Naussbaum features games and learning activities from every subject for various grade levels. The site offers language art games as well as lessons in punctuation, sentence puzzles, text structures in history, spelling, and much more.
Learn more: Mr. Nussbaum
5. Discussion Questions Contests
Students' listening and critical thinking skills will improve once you include this classroom favorite in your grammar lesson.
To keep an engaging classroom, encourage your students to participate by writing down the questions they have after reading a text. Your students will learn to find that balance between reading a book for fun and reading to understand.
Learn more: State of Michigan
6. Hunts
With a prize attached to these classroom activities, expect your students to dive fully into completing the hunt. Make the activity fun with puzzles to engage their critical thinking skills, and team exercises to build their communication and listening skills.
Learn more: Hey Natayle
7. Explore Haiku
Have your middle school students improve their poetry skill levels by including creative writing in your classroom lessons. They can try their hands at writing their own haikus, identifying themes in literature, and building language arts skills.
Learn more: Read Write Think
8. Create Word Clouds
Give students a time in history, and ask them what words come to mind when they think about that time. Now, you can build word clouds that capture your students' thoughts and feelings about this historical event.
Learn more: ELearning Industry
9. Writing Games
Play a fun game with your students by asking them to get creative with their writing. Give them the freedom of writing on whatever topic they want, and attach a perk for the winner to keep them motivated.
Encourage them to write sentences with correct letters, and watch out for comma placement.
Learn more: Ms. Jordan Reads
10. Pictionary
A classic game of pictionary never gets old; this fun game requires enthusiastic participants and very few resources. Your students' basic grammar skills will be put to the test as they draw their best interpretations of vocabulary words for members of their team to guess.
Learn more: We Have Kids
11. Parts of Speech Bingo
This excellent game will challenge your middle school students' understanding of the parts of speech. You will need a sheet with the different parts of speech. Your students can select the part of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, etc) that corresponds with the words you read aloud.
Learn more: 123homeschool4me
12. Sentence Games
Engaging grammar games make for fun classroom activities. Students will have a blast seeing who can make up the craziest sentence, correct sentences, and identify basic sentences.
Learn more: classroom.synonym.com
13. Board Games
Kids can take a break from online games with fun board activities such as Scrabble, Scattergories, and Buzzword. These interactive language arts games will sharpen their basic skills in spelling, and also broaden their vocabulary.
Learn more: Teachers Pay Teachers
13. Quiz Games
Engage your students with critical thinking games in your English classes. To make the games more fun, you can separate your class into teams and determine how many answers per game each team can give.
Learn more: Mom Junction
14. Story Telling
Your students can have the time of their lives telling creative group stories. Ask them to tell interactive stories to which their classmates will be able to ask questions.
Learn more: Cambridge
15. Spin the Word Wheel!
This activity can be used to develop students' parts of speech recognition skills. Write out a few words and put them in a sorting hat. Have a student randomly pull a word out, then get them to spin the wheel and answer the question it asks.
Learn more: E is for Explore
16. Simon Says
This light-hearted game is a classic. It's perfect to get sleepy kids going on a Monday morning because it gets them up and moving. Come up with a series of random instructions and test their listening and comprehension skills in a fun way!
Learn more: Fun ESL Games
17. Scrambled Words
This game is adaptable to all age groups. Pick out a few difficult vocabulary words and write out their letters on small post-its and scramble them. Divide the class into teams and turn this into a competition about which team can unscramble the words the quickest.
Learn more: TenTen 4 Kids
18. Beach Ball Fun
Get a cheap, inflatable beach ball from the dollar store. Write out different questions on the ball depending on the topic that you're trying to teach/reinforce. Get students to (gently) pass the ball to each other. The person who catches the ball reads the first question he/she sees, and the class answers it as a group.
Learn more: An Everyday Story
19. ELA escape room
This next activity is a little time-consuming, but it's bound to be a lot of fun. Transform your room into a themed escape room. The "clues" can be based on language learning. Divide the class into groups the the first team to correctly find and interpret all the clues needed to escape wins!
Learn more: An Everyday Story
20. Hangman
Old is gold! This is another favorite classic that helps students perfect their spellings. It requires absolutely no prior preparation as all it needs is a whiteboard and marker, which are already staples in each classroom. Students draw blanks, representative of letters of a certain word. They give their classmates a hint about the category that the word comes from. The classmates try to make calculated guesses about the word until their turns run out.
Learn more: Mike's Home ESL
21. Two Truths and a Lie
This is a fantastic game to play as an icebreaker at the start of term. Ask students to make three statements about themselves, two true and one false. The rest of the class can try to separate the truth from the facts.
Learn more: Easy ESL Games
22. Group Spelling Challenge
Write two versions of a commonly misspelled word on the board. Divide the class into two teams. Each team will collectively discuss and then identify the incorrectly spelled word. Keep a scorecard. At the end of class, the team with the most points wins. This game is also available online!
Learn more: English Club
23. Guess the meaning!
Draw out a basic story template on the whiteboard. Invite each member of the class to come and write one sentence on the board. The student who comes after the first one must continue from where the other left off. The aim is to form a coherent story by the time the last student is done with their turn.
Learn more: Buzzfeed
24. Create your own story!
This game is a simple but entertaining way to build students' vocabulary. Write out a unique word on the board (or project an online version of this game, as above), one that is less commonly used. Ask your students to guess the meaning. The person who guesses the right meaning first can get a small edible treat! Use the word in a sentence so students are able to remember it and add it to their everyday vocabulary.
Learn more: Teachers Pay Teachers
25. Weekly Reading Challenge
Make reading a competitive sport by having a weekly reading chart that you track. Again, this is going to be more interesting if students are incentivized to read by a small prize- may be an age-appropriate book!
Learn more: Just Add Students
26. Encourge discussion questions
In order to truly understand the curriculum, it is important to teach students to ask the right questions. After you're done teaching a topic, ask them what potential questions can be asked about that topic. Then test them to see if they can answer them.
Learn more: Now Spark Creativity
27. Create Your Own Board Game
Ask your students to design and build a board game around a book that you're reading in class. For example, if you're reading Pride and Prejudice, they could potentially create a game where the players look for attractive suitors to get married to.
Learn more: Now Spark Creativity
27. Create Your Own Board Game
Ask your students to design and build a board game around a book that you're reading in class. For example, if you're reading Pride and Prejudice, they could potentially create a game where the players look for attractive suitors to get married to.
Learn more: Now Spark Creativity
28. Madlib Stories
A madlib is an interactive story that you add words to. Write a template or download a ready-made one online. Leave out key sensory details for the students to fill in with their own vocabulary. Do not give them a vocabulary bank and let the story and blanks be open-ended. You'll be surprised at the sheer variety of different directions that each of their stories takes.
29. Review Jeopardy
Have a test coming up? Spruce up your revision by conducting it in jeopardy format. It's quite possible that most middle schoolers will be too young to remember the beloved game show that this activity is based on, but that's all the more reason to try and revive it! For more details, click on the link above.
Learn more: The Classroom
30. Line it up
Tell a complex, multi-part story and tell your students to listen carefully. Before you do this, write out the main events of the story on notecards. The complexity of the story can vary based on the target age group. After you are done telling the story, jumble the cards up and tell the students to arrange them based on the correct order in which they heard the story.
Learn more: Lexia Learning
31. Picture Perfect
Ask students to draw a picture of a concept they've recently learned in class. Once everyone is done, you can show the best illustrations to the whole class and ask them what concept they think it represents. A great way to encourage creative learning!
Learn more: Lexia Learning
32. Reverse Game Show
Start off your lesson with a review-focused game show. Ask your students gameshow-style questions to reinforce the concepts taught in the previous lesson. This quick five-minute activity will not only pep the students up but also give you an idea about their level of understanding, and in turn help you determine which subject areas to spend more time on.
Learn more: Lexia Learning
33. Missing Persons
After reading a story out loud, pick a couple of volunteers to leave the room. Give them 5 mins and ask them to return impersonating any of the characters in the story. The rest of the students can try to guess which character the student is trying to portray. This helps develop students' theatrical and observational skills.
Learn more: Lexia Learning
34. Public Speaking
Get the whole class to practice their public speaking skills by picking a random topic for them to speak on for two mins. This will be impromptu. You can write out the topics beforehand on pieces of paper and let students randomly draw any one piece of paper.
Learn more: ELA Today
35. Play-Doh Fun!
Who said Play-Doh was for elementary schoolers only? You can use Play-Doh to create an interactive activity that teaches the students about the many different stages of the writing process. For more information, please follow the link above.
Learn more: Reading and Writing Haven
36. Last Person Standing
Decide on a theme. Have students stand in a circle and pass a baton to each other. With each baton pass, the aim is to try and come up with different words that fit that theme. Anybody who repeats a word or is unable to come up with one has to sit down. Last person standing wins!
Learn more: Opportunity China
37. Board Race
Somewhat similar to the previous game, but to be played on the board and in a group. Choose two different colored markers and randomly assign the two teams two different categories. Each time will be tasked with collectively coming up with as many words pertaining to that particular category within the span of a minute. The team with the most words wins.
Learn more: ESL Active
38. 20 Objects
Test both memory and vocabulary by showing students 20 objects related to the topic you're teaching. Give everyone a piece of paper and tell them to write down as many objects as they can remember. The person who manages to remember the most items gets a small treat!
Learn more: Discovery Express Kids
39. Hot Seat
Divide the class into two teams. The students should be facing the board, and there should be two chairs with their backs to the board. One member from each team will sit on the chair (the "hot seat"). Their classmates have to make them guess the word that has been written on the board(and is not visible to them). The first team to guess correctly wins!
Learn more: Teaching English
40. Whiteboard Acronym
Teach students what an acronym is by writing out a word on the board vertically. Then ask them to provide you with a word starting with each letter of the vertical word.
Learn more: Daily Teaching Tools
41. Agree or Disagree
Write a controversial statement on the board and ask your students to either agree with it or disagree with it. Then make those who agree to engage in a short debate with those who disagree.
42. Tell Me Where to Go
This activity involves turning your class into a maze and dividing your students up into multiple teams of two. Within a team, one partner will be blindfolded and the other partner will tell his/her blindfolded buddy where to go using prepositions.
Learn more: Go Overseas
43. 15 Questions
This activity involves turning your class into a maze and dividing your students up into multiple teams of two. Within a team, one partner will be blindfolded and the other partner will tell his/her blindfolded buddy where to go using prepositions.
Learn more: Games 4 ESL
44. Top 5
Ask any question and ask the students to guess what the top 5 answers to that question were. This game works well for reviewing vocabulary and expressions. If they write any one of the top 5 answers, they get points. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins!
Learn more: Games 4 ESL
45. Stick it!
Write down key concepts from your lesson onto sticky notes. Get a volunteer student. Stick the post-it onto his forehead without letting him see it. Let him try to guess this with the help of his classmates.
Learn more: Vocabulary Luau
46. What Would You Rather Do?
Break your class up into groups of 3-4 students. Compile a list of "Would you rather...?" questions. The funnier, the better. For example, "Would you rather smell like feet or smell like eggs?". Once they make their choice, ask them to discuss why they chose what they did.
Learn more: Games 4 ESL
47. Riddles
Riddles are a great way to compel students to think out of the box and sharpen their creative skills. Follow the link above for 10 relatively simple but interesting riddles to use for your middle schoolers.
Learn more: Games 4 ESL
48. Mystery Box
Divide the class into two teams. Take turns asking both teams questions. Whenever each team gets an answer right, they get a "mystery box". They can either choose to open the mystery box or pass it on to the next team to open. The mystery box can either contain positive points (+100) or negative points (-100). At the end of the game, the team with the most points wins. To download a PPT template of this game, follow the link above.
Learn more: Games 4 ESL
49. Sentence Relay
It can be tricky finding English language arts activities to keep older children engaged. Many websites and online resources are more focused on learning activities suitable for elementary kids, but everyone loves playing!
Learn more: Classroom Synonym
50. Spelling Bee
Give students a list of spellings to memorize. On the day of the Spelling Bee, divide the class into teams. Call students from each time forward and randomly assign a word for them to spell. The team with the most words right can get a treat at the end!
Learn more: Prodigy Game
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