With football being the most popular sport in the UK, we wouldn’t miss out on a great opportunity to play a fun outdoor Vocabulary Football Game with our 4th graders! Our class was divided in two teams: Arsenal and Manchester United. Our students got club badges and an Arsenal and Manchester United club flag respectively and then rushed off to the school pitch! To win the Vocabulary Football Game they had to use both their vocabulary knowledge and their football skills!
To describe the game in very simple terms, the player of each team gets one chance to score 2 ‘goals’. The first goal is scored by correctly answering a vocabulary question or a question about English football. The second goal is scored simply by scoring a penalty goal against the other team. All students made a great effort to ‘score’ both goals, when their turn came. Manchester United eventually scored more goals than Arsenal, but the true winners are both teams as all players were really excited to participate in this game and thoroughly enjoyed learning some new football terms in English, such as what a “keepy-uppy” is or what a “bicycle-kick” looks like!
Revising and learning vocabulary in this way is immensely engaging for our kinesthetic learners and provides an excellent context to enhance our students’ motivation, simply because English becomes the means for them to work on topics they love talking about! The idea for this activity originates in a wonderful British Council website devoted to learning English through football: www.premierskillsenglish.britishcouncil.org. It’s a website that brims with fun activities and videos aimed at helping students to learn English through football! As such, it is highly recommended for our young football fans!
We look forward to our next sports-related English activity!