Finger Twister: the Present Simple Tense Review
– Are there any games to teach the Present Simple tense? My kids forget it so quickly.
You can turn any drill into a game by using game mechanics (see a few tips on how to do it in my post 1 WORKSHEET – 10 GAMES). Similarly, you can turn any game from the external world into a teaching tool.
My today’s post shows how to adapt Finger Twister to provide repeated practice of the Present Simple. Finger Twister is like a Twister but for a hand, which makes the game suitable for large classes.
We’ll design two version of the game – a low-resource version (half of A4 size paper) and a version that will require more resources rather than just a sheet of paper.
Option A
Materials needed: half of A4 size paper
Hand out a sheet of paper to make a play board.
Make a square by folding one corner diagonally.
Fold the excess paper and fold the square 4 times. Unfold the sheet. In the squares on the left side, put in personal pronouns. As a visual scaffold, ask students to put in a dollar symbol in the squares with the pronouns he/she/it (usually, it is the third form singular that is problematic to remember for students). The dollar symbol may serve as a visual mnemonic that might help learners remember “he+verb$“, “she+verb$“ and “it+verb$“ structures better. The 16 squares are the actual playing field. You may use a simple version with numbers in the squares
or a more colourful one, with 4 colours.
For each number/colour, write a verb (or 4 verbs) on the whiteboard.
E.g. I’ve chosen the following verbs to practise simple present and talk about sports
On each ‘spin’, count to three – one player calls out the pronoun and the other player calls out the number/colour. Alternate who calls what. After the player has put the finger on the number/colour, they should make up a sentence with the verb in the Present Simple tense. Have your students alternate positive and negative statements, yes/no questions and wh-questions.
Make it more challenging and have your students make up a sentence about themselves/somebody they know, i.e. replace the respective personal pronoun with a noun/name. Players may not lift their fingers between turns. The player who keeps their fingers down the longest wins.
Make it more challenging and have your students make up a sentence about themselves/somebody they know, i.e. replace the respective personal pronoun with a noun/name. Players may not lift their fingers between turns. The player who keeps their fingers down the longest wins.
Option B
This option requires more resources. Finger Twister, just like Twister, is usually played with a color spinner. You spin the spinner and let the player use any finger on the correct color. Inexpensive solutions might include: a) making your own spinner (see here), or b) using a die (or a set of dice), c) using the Spinning Wheel in PowerPoint designed by Tekhnologic.
This Spinning Wheel has 7 colours. We can introduce 3 additional rules for the 3 colours that are not used on the Twister board:
Orange – repeat the last two sentences. Skip your turn if you don’t remember them.
Pink – one finger off the spot.
Purple – Your Choice – make up your own move.
Before your students play the game, add particular verbs to each segment of the wheel and print out the ‘boards’.
Now point your fingers and do the twist.
* * *
Finger Twister can be used to revise other grammar units or vocabulary. Check this fascinating version of vocabulary Finger Twister from Did You Moji Today.
If you have Wi-Fi in the classroom, you could also make use of this online Wheel Decide (thanks to Lesson Plans Digger for sharing this resource).
