Coloured Cups
Looking for English games for children? ‘Colourful Cups’ super easy EFL game for kids to set up. All you'll need is a pack of white paper cups, a coin and five different coloured felt tip pens/sharpies. The colour of the pens doesn't matter as long as they are all different colours.
For this example, we'll use a red marker, a yellow marker, a blue marker, a purple marker and a grey marker.
Along with your five felt-tip pens, take 20 paper cups.
Oh…and your coin.
Setting Up Your Cups
With one of your coloured felt-tip pens, make a small coloured dot on the inside at the bottom of four of your paper cups. Now get a new colour and make a small dot at the bottom of another four cups. Keep going with a new colour on another four cups until all 20 of your paper cups have a coloured dot at the bottom. You are now ready for class.
Getting your teams ready
Divide your class into two teams. Place your 20 cups on the floor upside down. You should not be able to see the coloured dots on the inside of the cups. Get all your students to turn around and hide the coin under one of the cups. Now get your students to turn back again. Make sure no one has peeked under which cup you placed the coin!
How to Play ‘Coloured Cups’
Ask an English question to one student in the first team. This can be from a flashcard, making a sentence, saying a word, whatever. If the student gets it right, they can turn over any one cup to try to find the coin.
The chances are that they won't find the coin, but if they find a cup with a red dot, then they get 2 points. Yellow = 3 points. Blue = 4 points. Purple = 5 points. Grey = 6 points.
Once a cup has been turned over, then take it away leaving one less cup on the floor to choose from.
Find the coin
Keep taking turns asking questions to students on both teams and turning over a cup one by one. Make sure to keep a tally of points on the board. Once a student eventually finds the coin, then their team get a bonus 5 points + whatever colour the cup was.
The team with the most points wins the game. Best of three games wins. This is an easy way to practice questions and answers and for students to remember vocabulary or grammar. Coloured cups is super fun and super easy and your EFL kids will be sure to love it.
Would you like to play more EFL games for kids?
Snakes and Ladders is a common game from everyone's childhood, yet strangely often gets overlooked or forgotten within the ESL classroom. This is a shame, because Snakes and Ladders is an excellent TEFL classroom tool for language acquisition. Playing Snakes and Ladders provides an excellent platform for review work within a class of both younger or older children.
Teaching ‘clothes’ vocabulary is one of the most common themes in any ESL syllabus for children. This wonderful craft activity to teach clothes words to kids is a real winner, with lots of speaking involved, too.
This is a fantastic review activity for your class and is perfect if you have an old cardboard box sitting around doing nothing in your house. Choose some key English vocabulary which the ESL class has been studying in the last few weeks.
You can either play this ESL game with kids or you can actually play this ESL game as an adults speaking activity, too.