Angry Birds

Any good teacher EFL or otherwise knows that you have to engage the students on their level and through the things that interested them.

You probably are all way too painfully aware of how popular a group of slightly peeved off birds have been lately. Well I could never get my students to stop talking about them. Flash cards of birds were automatically referred to as angry birds. The flash card for angry was also changed to angry bird. Well I just went with it and adapted a popular throwing game to include angry birds, pigs, and crazy challenges.

This is a team game so you should divide the class into 2 teams first. I usually go for boys and girls as it's the simplest and fastest way to do it. I usually start my classes by drawing 2 teams on the board writing boys and girls and then drawing a simple caricature of a boy or a girl. I am one of the worst artists in the world. But I always try to exaggerate some feature. Tiny head, 1 massive eye, massive head, buck teeth, huge nose, anything to make the kids laugh a little.

Anyway. The basic idea of this game is all the flash cards are on the board and 1 student comes to the front with the angry bird teddy. You say a word from the vocab list and the student has to hit it with the angry bird. I usually give the students 2 chances unless there's lots of students or only a short amount of time. If the student hits the correct flash card they get a point for their team and then take a step back or go to the next row of tables. Where the process repeats except now they get 2 points if they hit the target. Each row or step that they take back increase the points that are played for. I normally make the back wall of the class worth 10 points!

A variation that I play when I don't have much time just allows the students to have 1 shot, but they get to chose where to take the shot from. I can almost guarantee the girls will win at this game. The boys all go for the 10 point shot and miss and the girls keeps taking 1, 2, or 3 points and before the boys realise the game has slipped out of their reach!