Now teaching English as a foreign language should be something that is fun, or at least that’s the way I and my students view it. The more fun you can inject into your English lessons the more your students will enjoy the experience, and learning English will seem like effortless fun to them!

One way to inject a large amount of fun into your ESL lessons is to introduce fun games and activities. Now when I talk about games and activities they needn’t be overly hard and complex. In fact the simpler you keep things the easier your lesson will be for you and your students.

Let me introduce you to one ESL activity that goes down a storm in my lessons. The kids cry out for more, they sometimes go wild!

Draw the tail on the big buffalo ESL game

Now this is my little variation on pin the tail on the donkey. However it’s been adapted by me for my kids in Thailand. Firstly the buffalo is an animal that is considered funny in Thailand. So as soon as I mention this game the kids are already laughing!

How to play

Split the kids up into two teams. You can call them anything you like, but it’s usually better to get the kids to choose a team name.

Get a kid who is a good drawer to come out and draw a big buffalo on the board. Most kids are pretty good at drawing so you’ll usually find a few budding artists to choose from.

Pre-teach the vocabulary you’ll be using. For this game I always use it to teach directions etc. So write on the board… Go forward, stop, turn around, left, right, go back a little, up a bit, down a bit, above, below.

Now take off your Tie and pick a student. Use the tie as a blindfold and when the student has the blindfold on go over to the board and put an x on the spot where the buffalo’s tail should be.

After that have the students use the commands to steer the blindfolded student to the board and draw a tail as near to the x spot as he or she can. Repeat the procedure with the other team and give points for the tail that is drawn nearest the x spot. Http://thailanddelights.blogspot.com http://esljobs4teachers.com