A Hilarious Game All Students Will Be Excited To Play

One of the stand out party games of my college years is Cards Against Humanity.  It stands out for being ridiculously full of pop culture references, dirty jokes, and silly puns – and it’s so easy to play at all levels of inebriation.  I must have played that game at over 50 different parties/social gatherings.  

My college days are long behind me, but my love of that game still lingers. So I did what I do best, I used it to inspire me to create my own game. I call this game Sentence Fillers (Calling it ESL Cards Against Humanity would probably get me sued and I’ve already said before that I am terrible at naming games. My actual students just call it English Card, which is an even worse name). 

Over the years I’ve written many different versions of this game to use in my English class.  And every time I’ve played it, it’s been a hit with the students.  As it turns out, you don’t actually need the dirty jokes to have a great time.

Now, what I have for you is my new and improved version of Sentence Fillers.  It’s ESL friendly as well as child friendly (though I recommend playing it with kids at least 12 years old).  I also made sure the printable cards are separated by various grammar points and vocabulary so that you can easily choose to print only what you are sure your students will understand.  

And on top of all that, I have included blank, fillable, cards.  This is so you can customize the cards for your class.  For example, my Taiwanese students played with a card that simply said “Tsai Ing-Wen” and my Korean kids have a card that says “Moon Jae In’s sparkly glasses”.  It is very fun to use your classes’ interests and inside jokes in the game, so definitely customize as much as you can.

How To Play

There are two kinds of cards; blue sentence cards and white fill-in cards.  Have all the students grab four white cards and place the blue cards face down in the center.  After that, ask a random review question.  The student who answers first and/or has the best answer becomes the first judge.  They must pick a blue card and read it out loud.  The other students will then place a white card from their hand face down in the center.  When all the students have finished placing cards down, that judge flips the cards over and reads them with the blue card.  They then pick their favorite white card, and the player that placed that card gets one point and becomes the new judge.  Continue until time is up. 

There are some simple changes I make while playing this game to better suit each class I have. For example, if you have a students who aren’t very fair with each other, you can make them all takes turns to be a judge instead of letting the winner be next. Even better you can just act as the judge yourself. This has the added bonus of letting you cheat to make sure everyone has a few points and no one is sad.

If you want your students to discuss even more, you can have them debate and vote on the winner – with the teacher getting the final say. Make sure to review their persuasive language right before playing this game, or have some helpful guides written on the board for them to use.

And if you really want to shake things up, swap the blue and white cards. Now students must place the best blue card in their hand to match the white card in the center.

I’m sure there are an infinite amount of variations you can think of to keep this game interesting and fun. If you have one in mind, let me know.