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A range of very different teaching strategies or themes exists. Songs, chants and music, playing games, using stories, art and crafts and drama are all considered as efficient and recognized teaching techniques, especially in regard to teaching English to young learners. It also work excellent for adult students, but takes less place in syllabus. In this essay I would like to elaborate the subject of Games in the classroom in detail. My consideration is based on ITTT-courses related to this. As suggested by authors of ITTT-courses before, if we make a list of 20 games that we have played and enjoyed in our life and spend a little time thinking about them, we will find that they can be adapted fairly easily for classroom use. ITTT course materials define a game as any activity with a purpose, rules and an element of fun. There are many games which younger or adult learner play outside of the classroom and this can be adapted for teaching. For the older learners, we cannot spend all of our time playing games. However when thinking about our longer communicative activate activities we should try to use games, in some adapted form at least some of the time. Our older students spend a fair proportion of their days being serious, so a bit of light relief is always appreciated. Here is the start of the list: Monopoly, Pictionary, Battleship, Hangman, Trivial Pursuit etc. So how can these games be adapted for our classroom use? Let's take Monopoly first. The game of Monopoly can be adapted by making each of the chance and property squares into a question. These questions can cover any area of topic and therefore the game can be used for general revision. No money need be used, instead if you answer a question correctly you get a house; if not you get nothing. Hangman is a useful warmer activity. It can be used to good affect to introduce vocabulary when you are not sure if they know the word. We play hangman with that word; we can give our man ears and eyes etc to extend it until students fill in all the letters and then ask someone to give us a definition of the word. If they can't then we will need to tell them. Hangman can also be used for compound words and short phrases. When thinking about the use of the games in the classroom, a mistake that is often made is that teachers think of a game first and then think about how they can adapt it to teaching point. This is completely a wrong way round. We should start with the teaching point and think about which games could be used to cover that point. It is unlikely that any particular game can be use without some form of adaptation. As a final consideration, games by their nature tend to create noise and excitement, teachers should be prepared for this and have some strategies available for cooling things down if they do get out of hand. Usage of games in classroom is also related to multiple intelligence availabilities, this makes an achieving learning objectives more efficient, variable, interesting and useful. Games bring fun and pleasure into learning process, let students enjoy a company of each other and studying.
