Fish Pond...Use poles, with lines and (safety pin) hooks, bucket or wash basin and word cards.

Each player gets to snag 3 "fish" (word cards) - put onto the "hooks" by your helpers....works best if the fisher is in front of a curtain and hidden from the helper. They have to say each word correctly, and try to make at least one compound word from their "catch".

Tic Tac Toe

Get a pre made game or make your own and decorate according to your party theme. This carnival game can be played indoors or outdoors. MATERIALS

Tic Tac Toe Game Board Bean Bags Cones or Tape or Sidewalk Chalk to mark where to stand
INSTRUCTIONS 1. Buy or make a tic tac toe board. 2. Give each child 4 or 5 bean bags 3. Three in a row wins! Classroom Scrabble Activity This classroom English activity is based on the classic board game called Scrabble, once you've made the tiles it's a really simple and fun ESL game to play. I made around 100 tiles (7cm x 7cm paper squares, 1 per student is fine though so you might want to make less than I did) with letters and points on them. I used almost the exact same points scale as the board game: 0 points: Blank tiles x 15 (normally only x4) 1 point: E 12, A 9, I 9, O 8, N 6, R 6, T 6, L 4, S 4, U 4 2 points: D 4, G 3

3 points: B 2, C 2, M 2, P 2 4 points: F 2, H 2, V 2, W 2, Y 2 5 points: K 1 8 points: J 1, X 1 10 points: Q 1, Z 1 I increased the number of 'blank' tiles (which can be used as any letter but are worth 0 points) to 15 as they are exciting for the students and make the game more interesting (I also drew stars on them because kids love that kind of thing). I split the students into groups of 8 to 10 and give each student one tile. Using their tiles as a team they try and make a word (just 1 word) that has the most points possible (1+3+2+1+8 = 15, you get the idea). I give them a few minutes to think about it before asking for their words (keeping track of the points on the whiteboard). After each round I take the tiles the team used to make their word and replace them with new ones. For example if their word was 'CAT', they get 3+1+1 = 5 points and I take the letters C, A and T and give them 3 new tiles to work with. They can also choose to change all their tiles for new ones at any stage of the game, with the downside being that they get 0 points for that round (not usually worth it but if they're really unhappy with their letters then it gives them an option). I usually get through around 5 or 6 rounds in 25 minutes. To spice it up a little I make the second to last round double points and the last triple.

Classroom Pictionary Activity

Pictionary is a great game that is perfect for adapting into a classroom English activity. There are a number of different ways to play but the following is what worked best for me and my ESL classes in Japan.

Make 4 sets of 10 cards (4 sets of 5 is fine if you don't feel you need so many), set 1 is for easy words, set 2 for medium, set 3 for difficult and set 4 for very difficult. Write words of your choice on the cards depending on the level of the students you teach.

I tended to use objects for the easier categories and ramped it up to verbs and adjectives for the more difficult categories. Here are some examples of the words I used:

Easy: book, car, tree

Medium: movie, snow, light

Difficult: open, shout, slow

Very difficult: surprise, clean, throw

Split the class into around 4 or 5 groups and have a student from the first group come up and choose a category, with 1 point on offer for a successful 'easy' drawing up to 4 for a successful 'very difficult' drawing.

Once the student sees the word they have 1 minute to draw on the blackboard, remembering to follow Pictionary rules such as giving no verbal clues and not drawing letters and numbers. The remaining students in the team try to guess the word (while the rest of the class stay silent).

Continue the process with the other teams while keeping track of the scores. To spice things up a little feel free to let other teams guess the word if the original team are unsuccessful in their 1 minute, giving them the chance to take each other's points.