Five flashcard only games

Looking for flashcard games to do with your students is a bit like looking for bodyweight exercises to do at home. Every article says that the exercises are for home but then you get a list of equipment you need to buy. There are thousands of games and activities you can do with your students with just a minimum of equipment but what if you don’t have any? Maybe you’re doing a demo and can’t drag around a suitcase of equipment or maybe you’re new at your kindergarten and haven’t yet scavenged around for extra hula-hoops?

The following are five flashcard games you can do with your students that are fun but still help the students develop their English speaking skills. Each game has its basic form and a more competitive version to keep the students’ excitement level up. This games are such that you can walk into the classroom carrying no more than your flashcards with you.

Hot flashcard

This game is very simple and best used when first introducing words. Give the first student in the row a flashcard. He/she has to say it as fast as possible and pass it hot potato-like to the next student who says it as fast as possible before passing it on. The flashcard makes the whole circuit until the last student where you pick it up and start over with the next flashcard. The students will have fun passing the card along as fast as they can. If you’re teaching K2 or K3 then you can have the student say whatever sentence structure you are working on before passing the flashcard to the next student and if they say it wrong the card can’t move forward until they say it right. You can pick different starting points for the circuit.

To spice up this game, you can introduce a time element. Start by timing with your phone’s stopwatch, or just counting to yourself if you don’t have a phone or watch, how long it takes for each card and write the time on the board or announce it. If your class is in the usual horse- shoe shape, you can time each row individually and compare times. You can also do boys vs girls or any other variation you can think of.

Musical flashcards

Put the cards in a circle in the middle of the class space and call up the same number of students. Either play music or count silently as the students walk in a circle around the cards. When you stop the music or just say stop, each student has to either say the word they are on or use it in the sentence structure you’ve been practicing.

To make things more interesting, you can have one more student then flashcards and reduce the number of cards each turn like the real musical chairs but you’ll have to make sure the students don’t start running. Sometimes the competitiveness keeps the students from focusing on the words but it makes for a fun change every so often.

Round robin

Line up your cards in a vertical row along the middle of the classroom. This game works best with four to six cards. Call up two students at a time and assign one to each side. As you say a word, the students have to move to that word on their side. Depending on the length of your class and number of students, you can just do one word per pair or you can do a few in a row, moving them up and down the row of flashcards. The students can either repeat back the word to you or, for K-2 and K-3, use the word with the sentence structure you’re working on.

You can add on one or two students in a line on either side and have two “worms” moving up and down as you say the words.

A more competitive variation and where the name comes from, is when you start with two students and pay attention to who gets to the words first. The slower student sits down while the faster one stays in and goes up against the next student. Each turn the slowest student sits down and the faster one stays in.

The slap o’meter

Put a table down in the middle of the classroom and put four to six flashcards on it. Call up four students at a time, though you can do up to six depending on the table size. As you say the word, the students have to slap their hand down on the correct word and say it back or use it in a sentence structure. If they are just doing the word by itself, you should have time to cycle through all the words for each group even if you’re only doing a 25 or 30-minute class. If they are making sentences, you might want to limit each group to two or three words.

You can also call up two students at a time and do a round robin competition, depending on the age and level of your students, but it’s difficult to keep the rest of the students engaged as it’s hard for them to see what the playing students are doing.

Students vs zombie

Pass out all the flashcards to the students. The more flashcards you have the better, as more students can be involved so this is a good game when reviewing the month’s lexis. Make sure all the students are holding the flashcards so other students can see what they have. Call out the word you are heading too and slowly head zombie-like in the direction. The student with the card has to call out a word that another student is holding which sends the “zombie” towards the new word. Once the students have the hang of it, you can have a student play the zombie, though you will probably have to point out where the new word that gets called out is to keep the game moving along. You can also have the students saying sentences using someone else’s word for K-2 and K-3. If you have thirty students and only six flashcards, you can have each student with a word pass it to the student next to them when each new round starts so that they all eventually get a turn.

Variations include substituting different types of monsters in for the zombie, i.e. robot, crocodile, Godzilla. You can start moving faster and faster after each word is said but let the students win by having the zombie collapse if they can keep it moving fast enough for a while. 

I hope you find these games useful. There’s lots of variations that you can come up with. If you have a longer class you can do a few of the games in a row with minimal setup, often having whichever students are holding the flashcards at the end of the first activity set up the cards for the second activity.

Let me know if you try these and how they work for you, as well as if you have any flashcard games you like to play.