ESL Flashcard Game for Kids and Teens: Climb the Tree

This is a whole class ESL flashcard activity for kids and teens which will give your students some excellent speaking practice. They will be asking and answering questions with a goal to reach at the end. A quality TEFL flashcard activity.

Setting Up the Classroom

On the whiteboard, draw a big tree with two ladders going up either side.

On the classroom floor, lay a long, straight, single line of flashcards leading up to the whiteboard. Make about 1m of space between each flashcard.

Divide your class into two teams. Get one student from each team to face each other at the end of the flashcard line. Depending on ability level, they can either both just say the word, or ask a question about it e.g. What is it? It's a .....

The pair of students then moves up to the next flashcard and go again. Meanwhile, a new pair of students joins behind them to ask and answer on the first flashcard.

Pairs keep moving on up the flashcard line and new pairs joining behind. Once a pair gets all the way to the front and finishes the last flashcard, they play Paper, Scissors, Stone ­- the winning student moves a marker one rung up the ladder on the whiteboard.

The front pair now walk around to the back of the line and start again. The team to move their marker to the top of the ladder first wins!

Need more ESL flashcard games?