25 Vocabulary Charades
Sarah Spindler
Strategy Overview
- This is a kinesthetic activity that puts students into teams. They take turns silently acting out vocabulary words for their classmates to guess.
- This helps students build a good vocabulary. It also encourages collaboration and aids language acquisition for any multilingual learners in your class.
- Teachers can use this to review new vocabulary during the literacy block, or to review any new content- specific vocabulary (Bolen, 2023).
- According to Compton, (n.d) vocabulary “enhances reading comprehension by giving readers the capability not only to recognize words, but also to understand their meanings within a text.” (Compton). If students do not know the meanings of the words they encounter, it will be difficult to comprehend what they are reading. It will only get worse as they grow older.
Strategy in Action
Students have been learning about food, and there is much new vocabulary to learn. Drilling them while they try and sit still is nearly impossible, so breaking them into teams and letting them move, play and laugh is a great way to learn and have some fun. After reading Dragons Love Tacos in the read- aloud, make a list of words we learned, put them in a bowl, and have groups take turns pulling out a word to act out.
Teacher: My friends, we just learned lots of food words. Now we are going to play a game to see how well we know our new words. Let’s count off by 4s to make groups
Students: count off by 4’s, stand with group members
Teacher: group 1, come take a piece of paper from Ms. S’s bowl. Group 1, without talking or making noise, you are going to act out this word. Groups 2,3, and 4, you are going to guess the word. Whoever guesses correct first gets a point.
Group 1: acts out jalapeño.
Possible Charades words:
- Spicy
- Jalapeno
- Chicken
- Beef
- Cheese
- Tomato
Related Resources
- Here is a very detailed procedure for Vocabulary Charades: charades-esl-game
- This website also has some great lists of charades words, as well as lists of words and definitions: Charades Words for You to Act It Out – ESLBUZZ (Bolen, 2023)
