Shiritori is a classic ESL game. You might know Shirotori as a word chain. It’s a fun and easy way to practice spelling and vocabulary in your ESL / EFL classroom.
Shiritori can work with big or small class sizes and with students from 10 years old to 100. It requires no set-up and no materials. If you happen to be teaching in Japan you simply have to say the word “Shiritori” and everyone will know what your doing.
How to:
- Pick a topic. The video uses animals.
- Say the name of an animal. E.g. PandA.
- The person sitting beside you then has to say the name of an animal whose name starts with A. A is the first link in the chain.
- If the second person says AlligatoR. The third person in the word chain will have to link to the letter R.
- Once you’ve done the activity once or twice as a full class it’s really easy to break your class into smaller groups and continue the activity.
- You can add excitement in a lot of different way: by adding a timer, keeping score of how many words the groups can think of, changing topics, etc.
