Quack, quack! This post is going to be a short one as I show you one of my favorite ESL games for my kids’ classes.
All you need to do is go to online-stopwatch.com and scroll down to Duck Race. Once you’ve tapped Duck Race, all you need to do is choose how many players you have, so that’s how many students you have in your class. You can also edit the list of names; the names represent the students in the class.
Another great game for young learners is Baamboozle’s new snakes and ladders board game. Read out to use it in class here.
Customise your ducks!
Once we’ve done that, in the bottom left-hand corner, we can choose what the ducks look like. So, we’ve got colors and costumes, just yellow ducks, or we can have various colors as well. I’m going to use colors and costumes because this is the setting that I use in my classroom. Okay, so here are the Ducks, ready to go. And all you need to do is ask your children, before they start, to choose a duck by describing it. So, for example, the first student would say, “I want the green duck with hearts,” or perhaps you have one student who would say, “I want the duck that looks like a chef.” So before you’ve even started the game, you’ve already got the students using some language of description.
Once the students have each chosen the duck, you can press start.
I’m going to ask student number seven to answer the question. So I use it as a roulette, and the great thing about this is that all the students are fixated on the race to see who’s going to win. And so I’m getting their attention, I’m engaging the students, and then when it gets to the end, I can then choose a student that wins and asks them the question.
If you do teach children, then make sure you go and read my post here!
How I use it in class
I do a lot of review activities in my class. For example, if I’d like to test each of my students’ knowledge of the previous week’s class, then I would let them choose a duck, we’d press start, the race would finish, and I would choose the winner as the first student to answer my set of questions about last week’s content.
While you’re here, check out Quizizz paper mode, a great way to utilize their quizzes with kids.
Another way to use this as a roulette is if you give your students responsibilities in class. For example, cleaning the board, writing on the board, collecting material, giving out material, etc., you could use the duck race to assign students responsibilities. When the race is over, you can even get your students to practice ordinal numbers: who came first, second, third, fourth, etc., and who came last. You could even use this to decide who is going to leave the class first. So, you would set this up and have the students choose a number, and then the students would make a line to leave the classroom in the same order as the race.
If after using this idea you’d still like some more, then check out my post here.
I’d love to know in the comments below how you would use this in your classroom. And again, the reason I love using this with children is it’s so simple and it really gets the students engaged in whatever activity or whatever questions you’d like to ask them.
As always, thanks for reading!