Verbs game for kids

10 Fun Verb Games and Activities for Kids

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  examples of action verbs for word games

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Learning about verbs in elementary school can be more fun than completing grammar worksheets! Teachers use verb games to introduce new grammar concepts as well as to review familiar grammar concepts. Try these games that teach about verbs in a way your students will love.

Classroom Games About Verbs

Since verbs are all about action, use fun classroom games that get kids up and moving! These games are perfect for elementary students and easily adapted for older learners. Make sure you have enough space to get the learning moving.

And Then…

Using a list of verbs on the wall or on individual handouts, one student selects a verb to use in the first line in a story. They choose another student to create the next line using one of the verbs on the list. The game keeps going until the list is through. For extra fun, make sure the verbs are especially zany!

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Charades

Have each student in the class write down three or four action verbs on a scrap of paper (or make your own list). Collect all the papers, split the class into two teams, and have one student from the first team pick a verb out of a box. They have one minute to act it out. If their team guesses correctly, they choose another verb and act it out until the minute runs out. Then it’s the next team’s turn!

Conjugation Station

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Write a noun or pronoun on the whiteboard. Set your class into four lines (“trains”). Whisper a verb to the first student in each line (the “conductor”) and a pronoun or noun to the last student (the “caboose”). The conductor verbally passes the verb down their lines.

The last student in the line determines how to correctly conjugate the verb according to the noun or pronoun they’ve been told. They whisper it back up the line, and the first “conductor” who has the correct answer scores a point for their train. Rotate the first student to the back of the line and try it again.

Fishing for Verbs

Younger learners may enjoy a creative, hands-on game that encourages them to choose the correct part of speech. Fill a kiddie pool (or make a masking tape circle on the carpet) with paper fish. Each fish should have a word written on it. For beginners, put nouns on half the fish and verbs on the other half; older learners can have fish with examples of all eight parts of speech. If it’s not a verb, they have to “throw it back.”

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Hot Potato

Choose an item to be your “potato” (e.g. a beach ball, a stuffed animal, a small pillow). Play some fun music and have the class either pass the “potato” around a circle or at their desks. Stop the music; the student holding the item has to name a verb. If they can’t think of one that hasn’t been said before, they’re out. For an extra challenge, have students list one verb per letter of the alphabet.

Jumping for Joy

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Using paper and a bold marker (big enough that all students sitting at their desks can see the words clearly), write several sentences with one word on a separate piece of paper. Mix up the papers, group them by sentence, and have each student take a word. (Each sentence is one round of the game).

Tell students to organize themselves in a sentence in a line in front of the class, holding their papers out for their classmates to see. Then say to your students, "If you are holding the verb, jump for joy (or perform the verb)." This is a great chance for your students to begin a discussion of what a verb is and how it functions in the sentence.

Making a Verb Story

Have students write verbs on scrap paper or make your own list. Divide the class into small groups and have each student choose one verb from a box. The group must work together to write a short story that uses every verb they’ve selected. At the end, they share their stories and the class votes for their favorite. (To make the game more challenging, increase the number of verbs that groups must use.)

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SWAT

You need a blackboard, chalk, and two fly swatters for this verb game. Break the room up into two teams. Make three big boxes (about 2'x2') and inside of them, write "helping," "action," and "linking," which are the three kinds of verbs.

For each turn of SWAT, have two students (one from each team) come up to the board. Have them each hold a fly swatter in hand. Then, read aloud one of your sentences. Their job is to swat at the correct box as soon as possible, identifying correctly whether the verb is a helping, action, or linking verb. The team with the most correct swats wins!

Stuck Verbs

Divide the class into groups and come up with a sentence with one or more verbs. Invite one student to make up a new sentence with the same verb in the same verb tense. Give that team a point, then have the next team try to create another sentence with the same verb. Keep giving out points until either a team can’t think of a new sentence or teams get tired of the initial verb. Challenge students by choosing trickier verbs or mandating that conjugations can only be used once.

Verb Cards

On the front of an index card, write a sentence and underline a verb in that sentence. Repeat this preparation with several more sentences and cards. On the back of each card, write whether the underlined verb is a linking, helping, or action verb.

If a student gets the answer right, they keep the card; if they do not, they can put the card under the deck. The students with the most cards at the end of the game wins. These kinds of verb games are for two students to play, and they ensure that students get a lot of individual practice while learning about verbs.

Games That Help Students Learn

Take these ideas and adapt the games for the students in your classroom so that they are appropriate for their age and learning limitations. For more engaging language arts ideas, check out a list of grammar games that are great for any age. You can also bring in noun games or adjective games when your students are ready for the next step.

9 Quick and Fun ESL Games to Teach Verbs and Tenses

By Elena Chou Last updated: October 7, 2022

If you want to go beyond the usual verb exercises, I’ve got the solution for you.

This guide will help you integrate ESL verb games into your lesson plans for fun in the classroom.

After all, there are so many tenses and grammar rules for students to learn!

ESL verb tense games—and verb games in general—encourage students to use verbs in personal and creative ways, making lessons much more enjoyable.

Contents

• 1. Hot Verb-tato
• 2. Pantomime Verbs
• 3. Verb Charades
• 4. Visual Verbs
• 5. Verb Snip
• 6. Jumbled Storyboard 
• 7. Communal Story
• 8. Story Trail
• 9. Mother, May I?
• Why Teach with ESL Verb Games?
• Tips for Using ESL Verb Tense Games

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

1. Hot Verb-tato

Ever heard of the game Hot Potato? Well, Hot Verb-tato is actually the variation of this timeless schoolyard game. But instead of just tossing a bean bag, balloon, ball or even a real potato to each other, the student with the “potato” needs to say a verb before passing the “potato” to another student.

Directions:
Arrange the students in a circle. Pick a round, easy-to-handle object as your “potato.” Put on some lively music (ESL music or nursery rhymes are great choices).

At the start, each student must say a verb and pass the “potato” to another student. When time runs out, the student holding the potato is subject to some lighthearted punishment.

To make the entire experience educational and fun, the punishment can be anything from singing the ABC song to answering three questions in English. Students may also be given three random verbs and asked to use them in three meaningful and related sentences, like a three-sentence story.

Alternative:
In classes with more advanced students, you can challenge students by limiting verb varieties by only allowing verbs that start with certain letters. For example, you could say, “For this round of Hot Verb-Tato, we can only say verbs begin with a, b and c.”

2. Pantomime Verbs

This is the perfect game for all levels, but especially for shy beginners. The game is great for expanding verb vocabulary while teaching students about rhyming in English.

Directions:
Explain the meaning of “rhyme” to your students and start practicing with nouns. After the students get the hang of the game, start with verbs by dividing the class into two to three teams, depending on your class size.

Begin by saying, “I’m thinking of a verb that rhymes with _​_​_​_​_​_.” Try to use single-syllable words and verbs.

Have students raise their hands when they have a guess. The first student who asks, “Is it this?” and acts out the right verb, earns a point for their team. Set the goal for points, and the team that reaches the threshold wins the game.

Alternative:
For advanced classes, the student who first pantomimes the right verb can start the game.

3. Verb Charades

Students often get confused between the simple present (I walk) and the present continuous (I am walking). That’s because, in English, an event that’s still happening isn’t expressed using the simple present.

Get your students more comfortable with the present continuous tense through a game of charades!

Directions:
Prepare slips of paper in advance, using well-understood activities that are easy to act out and using vocabulary that your students know. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Building a house
• Making the bed
• Setting the table
• Cooking /making a meal
• Doing homework
• Driving a car

Have the student act out the activity on their given slip. Students can suggest ideas for the student, but they must be correctly formatted in the following way:

• “You’re making the bed!”
• “Eric is riding a horse!”
• “He’s mowing the lawn!”

Any student who doesn’t formulate the sentence correctly must sit out that round and receive no points—even if they mentioned the right activity.

Examples of incorrect sentences are ones using an infinitive or partial infinitive (Make the bed!), a simple present (He makes the bed!) or a grammatically incorrect present continuous (He making the bed!).

Alternative:
For more advanced students, you can ask them to give several sentences for the same action. They can mention synonyms or even come up with wacky ideas!

For example, someone doing homework can also be writing in their journal, planning a travel itinerary or coming up with song lyrics.

4. Visual Verbs

Similar to Verb Charades, Visual Verbs is a great verb game to help ESL students practice different verb forms.

Directions:
Have a list of level-appropriate verbs ready before the game, and divide up the students into two teams. Write the teams on the board and draw three columns under each team, labeling the columns as “base,” ” past” and “past participle.”

Each team will choose one player to go to the front of the class. Give each representative a different verb and ask them to act out their verbs without speaking.

The teams have to try to guess what verb their player is acting out. The student who guesses the verb correctly for their team will have to come to the front of the class and fill out the three forms of the verb in the columns.

The game continues until the team runs out on their list of verbs, then they can start to steal from the other team’s list by guessing their verbs. At the end of the game, give a point for every correctly spelled and formed verb. The team that has the most points at the end is the winner.

Alternative:
If you have a more advanced ESL class, you can prepare two lists of verbs: one easy and one hard. Assign point values to the verb list based on their difficulty (eg. two points for “easy” verbs and five points for “hard” verbs). If students can’t guess the hard one, they can pass and get a one-point deduction.

5. Verb Snip

This is a great activity for all ESL levels. Verb Snip is a perfect game to challenge students to think creatively and expand their verb inventory. Because of the nature of the game, you may also use Verb Snip as a game for spelling practice!

Directions:
Arrange the students in a circle with one student in the center. The student in the center counts to five, then points to someone and asks them to spell a three-letter word.

“Dog.”

“D-O-G.”

Then the student in the center must slowly count to ten, and then point at a different student and say, “Snip!” The selected student must name three verbs that start with the letters spelled in the previous word.

“Draw, Order, Go.”

The student who names the three verbs switches places with the student in the center, then continues the game by choosing a new three-letter word for someone else to spell.

Alternative:
In a more advanced class setting, allow the student in the center to choose words with four letters or more, with no repeats allowed. You also can ban words with certain letters (like x, y and z).

6. Jumbled Storyboard 

English, like many languages, has several different past tenses. Use this to your advantage by playing a game of Jumbled Storyboard.

Directions: 
Draw or find pictures that create a logical (or illogical!) story. Place them in jumbled order on your whiteboard.

Students have to arrange the pictures in order to tell a story, but they can only do it by telling you what happened before and after.

A student must talk about the first picture in relation to the others so that the rest of the class can put them in the right order.

“The man was outside in his bathrobe because he saw the newspaper boy throw the newspaper onto the porch.”

After hearing the sentence, ask students to correct it for grammar and order, if needed. Place the next picture (it could be any picture), then ask students if it’s correct. If it isn’t, ask them to come up and choose the correct picture. Then have another student select the next picture for the story, and so on. 

Once the students understand the game, you can select a volunteer to take your place putting the pictures in order. Encourage fellow students to correct any mistakes by asking, “Is that correct?”

Alternative:
Make this more challenging by assigning numbers to the pictures, and then having each student draw lots on which picture should come next when it’s their turn. They then have to connect it to the previous picture while adding a logical explanation about why it’s the next in the sequence. 

7. Communal Story

Could, should and would can be difficult to understand for many ESL students. Many other languages use verb tenses to express these ideas, so the idea of using a helping verb can be difficult to grasp. Practice these words by having your students write a communal story.

Directions:
Start the story by giving an idea to write about, such as the main character or a plot point. Then have students volunteer their ideas by using could, should and would.

Imagine that the story is about an elephant who runs away from the zoo. Students might say:

• “What would he do? Maybe he would try to find some peanuts!”
• “Could we make him a pink elephant?”
• “Should we include a sidekick? Like a monkey?”

Designate one student as the notetaker to jot down brainstorming ideas on the board. Once there’s a communal story through this brainstorming session, each student writes his or her own version down in their notebooks, including all of the details that you’ve decided on as a class.

Allow students to read each other’s stories or read their own aloud to see just how many different versions of the same story you’ve come up with together!

Alternative:
You can step this up by setting more complex themes. For example, the story could be about modern life in an English-speaking country, a historical period or a haunted house, depending on the vocabulary you’ve been learning in class recently. 

8. Story Trail

Story Trail is a combined story-and-memory game. Students love the game because it challenges their language skills and linguistic creativity.

Directions:
Prepare a bag with verb cards. Form a circle. The teacher begins by picking a verb card from the bag and forming a sentence with the verb.

Pass the bag to the next student in the circle so they can pick a card, repeat the teacher’s sentence and form another sentence that contains the verb on the card.

The game continues with more sentences that need to be repeated (this is where the memory part comes in). The goal is for students to use verbs to make meaningful sentences, while connecting them to other people’s sentences, to form a story.

Alternative:
You can also turn Story Trail into a written game by dividing the class into different groups. Each group should have its own bag of verb cards. At the end of the game, each team can send a representative to the front of the class to read their story aloud. The class then gets to vote for the “Most Creative Story.”

9. Mother, May I?

Use this classic playground game to your advantage.

The game uses a familiar turn of phrase for a physical game that’ll get students up out of their seats and keep them from getting drowsy at their desks!

Directions:
Start with the traditional version of the game. Students line up at the back of the room, and the “mother” stands at the front. You, the teacher, should be the first mother.

When a student wins the game, they become the mother. A student asks, “Mother, may I…” and then makes a request to get closer to the front of the classroom.

“Mother, may I take two steps forward, hop once forward, take one lunge forward?”

The mother either says, “Yes, you may,” or “No, you may not. ” The student who reaches the front of the room first wins. Any mistake sends you back two steps!

You can then modify the game to use “can” and “could” in a similar way.

Alternative:
Ask your students not to repeat the same verb if another student has already used it! You can write down verbs on the blackboard to remind everyone.

Learning English is hard work, especially with that tricky grammar! Using games to teach English not only alleviates the pressure and stress of language learning, but also encourages teachers and students to create a friendly environment in which the language is useful and applicable to the real world.

Teaching verbs with ESL games will also:

• Provide a welcome break from the usual routine of language instruction.
• Encourage students to interact and communicate in meaningful manners.
• Model real-life context of language use.
• Create opportunities for lesson review in a pressure-free environment.
• Make language come alive while helping students to sustain the effort of learning.

When you integrate ESL verb tense games and other similar activities into your lessons, students are invited to take part in personalizing new English verbs by putting them in meaningful contexts. Through experimentation, interaction and live communication, ESL verb games can provide excellent opportunities for learners to use English verbs as native speakers would.

Additionally, these games would make the perfect jumping-off point for more in-depth lessons about verbs. For example, after playing Hot Verb-tato, you can take the list of verbs you used for the game and upload it to FluentU.

You can then assign students homework to choose a number of verbs and watch clips where they’re used (this is made easy with FluentU’s powerful vocab search engine as well as the video-enhanced flashcards). They’ll be able to check the meaning of any word through the interactive flashcards as they watch.

Alternatively, you can ask students to complete some activities with the flashcards, like reading and shadowing the example sentences on each card, which come with audio pronunciations. Or they can complete a session of flashcard review with the adaptive quizzes provided on the program.

All these activities can be completed on the website and mobile (iOS and Android) app.

Tips for Using ESL Verb Tense Games

Grammar games are useful in an ESL classroom to help students absorb grammar elements. Here are some tips for making the most out of them:

• Make sure your lessons appeal to different learning styles and ensure that no student slips through the cracks (as best as you can). Only when the entire class is familiar with a set of verbs or verb tenses should you introduce games into the lesson.
• Put grammar games at the end of the lesson. Traditional exercises on paper are useful when you’re first explaining a grammar point, but grammar games can deepen students’ understanding. This is because it’s harder for students to reproduce a grammar point in a freer setting such as a game, compared to on paper. Games require them to think on their toes and keep their brains running faster.
• Explain how the game works clearly. Be vigilant about enforcing not just the rules of the game, but also grammar rules, by making sure that students are producing grammatically correct sentences all along the way.
• Keep the game fun. When students make mistakes with grammar points that aren’t the main focus of the game, those errors don’t necessarily need to be penalized. Overall, the goal is to ensure that students feel comfortable and confident about speaking up and participating during the game!

By spicing up your ESL lessons with some of these games, your students will learn verbs in a fun, interactive way to make the words stick. And now that you’ve seen the power of ESL verb games, it’s time to enjoy the creativity, and perhaps make some of your own activities!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

Elena Chou

A linguist and a passionate writer, Elena shares pieces of teaching knowledge to help ESL teachers and students alike to find ingenuity beyond the conventional ESL learning process. Besides teaching, Elena is also a freelance content writer who specializes in providing engaging, original, and SEO content for business of all niches.

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Games and exercises for the formation of grammatical structure in children with OHP, practicing verbs

In previous articles, I wrote that the formation of the grammatical structure of the language is a particular difficulty in working with children with general underdevelopment of speech. And if you can cope with nouns and adjectives with the least loss, then working out verbs is extremely difficult. Difficulties are caused not only by the use and their agreement with nouns, but also by the formation of other forms from the infinitive. This is due to the fact that the verb is almost the central figure of the sentence, on which several logical chains close at once. It connects many other components of the sentence in meaning and has a complex semantic, morphological structure, capacitive content. Children with OHP are not able to simultaneously contain such a volume of information through one lexical element, therefore they have a small stock of words denoting actions, which hinders both the development of thought and their own statement. The imprint leaves a poor understanding of abstract concepts and relationships that do not have visual reinforcement, but are often expressed by the same verbs. nine0003

We also remember that children with speech pathologies are a heterogeneous group, and speech disorders can be both primary and secondary. If purely speech defects are supplemented by motor, mental abnormalities, reduced cognitive activity, the work of a speech therapist is delayed.

Parents can help their child too. At home, you can daily or at least 3-4 times a week for 10-15 minutes (or as long as your baby can withstand) engage in the formation of a grammatical structure and carefully work out the verb section when work with nouns is over. In this article we will not touch the theory - it is carefully considered in the previous two. We immediately move on to exercises and games for practicing verbs in the speech of a child with OHP.

Contents

1. Games and exercises for the formation of grammatical structure, verbs
2. Exercises for the selection of verbs denoting the actions of animals
3. Exercises for the use of the imperative mood of verbs
4. Doll, lie down
5. Commanding adults
6. Exercises for the use of verbs with pronouns
7. Verbs in the 1st person, singular, present tense
8. Verbs in the 3rd person, singular, present tense
9. Verbs in the 2nd person , singular, in the present tense
10. Exercises for the use of verbs with nouns in the singular and plural
11. Verb tense distinction
12. New word game
13. The formation of verbs using prefixes
14. Exercise “Tell me correctly”
15. Return form of verbs
16. We form a return form
17. who makes
18. The phrase - in a word
19. game “On the farm”

Grammatically correct speech is the right speech - this First of all, the ability to use word formation and inflection. As a rule, a normotypical child is ready to work on them from the age of 5. Children with OHP and other serious speech disorders may be included in correctional work closer to 6-7 years, since the analytical and synthetic activity of the brain, required to understand all these processes, develops late in them. nine0003

First of all, we learn to recognize the verb among other parts of speech. We use as much visual material as possible, show cards and verbalize them, also pronounce all our and his actions, do not forget to teach the child that verbs answer the questions “what to do”, “what to do”.

Animal action verb selection exercises

A simple and clear task: to say what an animal does.

Piglet oink-oink. What is he doing? - Grunts. nine0062