Categories in Columns

Draw a table on your whiteboard with 6-8 columns and put categories (e.g. food, animal, country) at the head of each column. Write a letter at the side and explain to the students that they have to think of a word for each column starting with that letter. Do one example on the board to get started e.g for A, write apple, ant, Australia etc.

The image above shows how the game might look if you played it for a very long time on a very large whiteboard. It's a bit small so here's an enlargement of part of it:

The categories shown are the most obvious, easy-to-complete ones. You can use other categories instead (see the many options in my previous post) but you want to make sure it’s something that actually has an answer for most letters. As you can see from the gaps in the picture even some ‘easy’ categories are hard to fill in for some letters, and you can forget the letter X altogether of course.

Students work in teams and shout out when they have finished for one letter. You check their spelling and award a point if everything is correct, keeping track of the score on the board. If they have trouble completing the full line then you can either tell them the first team to get 5 or 6 or 7 out of the 8 columns wins, or stop the game after, say, three minutes and count who has the most words. 

You don’t have to go in alphabetical order, of course. I usually alternate between an easy letter like M or S or T and a harder letter like F or J or Y so that the rhythm of the game varies.

Variation

You can also play this game the other way round, with letters- usually easy ones- at the top and categories added round-by-round at the side. See illustration below.

	B	C	M	S	T	W
Animal	Bee	Cat	Moose	Snake	Tiger	Whale
Country	Belgium	China	Malaysia	Sweden	Thailand	Wales
Job	Butcher	Carpenter	Mechanic	Soldier	Teacher	Writer
Part of the Body	Back	Chin	Mouth	Stomach	Toe	Wrist
Verb	Break	Cut	Make	Stop	Take	Wait

Abbreviations

s.t = something