Some Fun Activities To Make Your Next Reading Lesson More Engaging

If you were to ask most young ESL learners what kind of lesson they dislike the most, many of them would reply “reading lessons”.  It’s understandable, often I’ll find that the books I’m given are dull and tedious to read.  I don’t know how many times I’ve read about the water cycle in an ESL book, but it was too many. 

The best thing you can do for yourself and your students is pick out a better reading textbook. You can even find great articles and stories online.  That way you can find something more interesting and relevant to your students.  

However, we all know that not every school is going to give us that kind of freedom. Many schools will require you use the textbook given – but that doesn’t mean you have to give up and give in to the utter boredom of a terrible textbook.  Here are some easy activities you can use to make your reading lessons more fun and engaging.

Activities To Gain Interest:

Easy Peasy Trivia:

One thing you can do is take the main theme or topic of the reading and google trivia facts that go with it.  Then you can start off class with a fun trivia game of your choice using these facts as the questions/answers. Sometimes I like to model the trivia game after the kind of quizzes you would experience at a bar/pub. If I have more time to prepare, I may draw a simple board game map on a piece of paper and make the game play similar to Cranium or Trivial Pursuit. However you decide to use your trivia, make sure to add a competitive element. You can have your students play for points, for candy, or for something else.   

Activities To Strengthen Vocabulary:

Find The Word:

This isn’t really a game, but it’s a great way to improve your students ability to quickly scan texts. Simply give them a vocabulary word (one that shows up only once in the passage) and tell them the first one to find it and read the sentence it’s in receives some sort of reward. You can keep it that simple or you can follow it up by making them guess the definition of the word and/or make their own sentence using that word.

Guess The Word:

Start off by giving a definition or translation on the board (you may write more than one). Tell the students that the word/words associated with what you wrote on the board are in the reading somewhere. After you are all done reading, they have to guess what those words are. The trick here is to make sure that the passage you are reading has good context clues.

Activities To Keep Students Focused On The Text:

Number of words: 

This is based on a Whose Line Is It Anyway? game of the same name. Basically, have the students take turns reading in a certain order and also give them a certain number of words to read each time it’s their turn. You’ll end up listening to something like this:

Student 1: He said that she was…

Student 2: …very angry. They didn’t know…

Student 3: …what to do. So they…

This can be quite challenging and you may find students getting really confused the first time you read this way. Once they seem to understand you can make it more competitive by adding penalties whenever someone messes up. I would advise against anything too harsh, but something like “each failure gets a sticker and whoever has the most stickers at the end sings ABC with teacher” is light hearted and silly enough (side note: I believe the “with teacher” part is important so that you can take some of the embarrassment away from the student).

If you want to make the reading more chaotic and difficult, change from number of words to number of syllables. This version is very confusing at first and it may take awhile for the students to get the hang of it. It’s very fun to watch though.

Unnecessary Censorship: 

Make up a rule on what kind of words should be censored in the reading. For example, you can say every verb must be censored out or every word with the letter b in it. After making that rule you can go about this activity in may ways:

1. You can read the passage to your students and occasionally “BEEP!” out censored words. Have them guess at the end what the rule was for the censorship.
2. Tell your students the rule and make them censor themselves as they read out loud. Failure to do so leads to a silly penalty.
3. Have your students read but interrupt them with the “BEEP!”. Then make them guess the rule.
4. Make up more than one rule and have more than one censor sound. Now instead of guessing why you’ve said “BEEP!” in place of words they must also guess why some words are censored with “BOOM!” and “TOOT!”.

I think the reason why my students enjoy this activity is because even though they realize that there are no bad words in the reading, listening to someone censor themselves repeatedly is quite funny. Just imagine hearing your teacher say, “He walked into the BEEP and saw a BEEP. It was so BEEP amazing! He just BEEP to BEEP it. But she said BEEP!”.

Fill In The Blank:

In this activity the teacher reads out loud. Occasionally, you will pause and whoever says the next word in the reading first gets a point. This is possibly the quickest and simplest one on the list. I don’t like it as much, however, because it is also the most likely to fail to grab the full classes attention. Most likely only your star pupils will care to respond quickly. Still, it’s so easy that it may be worth it for you to try.

Activities To Test Comprehension:

What’s The Mistake?:

This is a nice way to finish the reading portion of your class. Tell your students they have a minute or two to reread the passage. When time is up, collect everyone’s book/worksheet. Then read it out loud to the class – but be sure to change some words or skip sentences. Students listen for the mistakes and stop you whenever they hear something wrong, gaining points every time they do so accurately.

If the reading is very long then you can instead summarize what happened and make mistakes in the summary. Summarizing helps test comprehension better than reading verbatim, but verbatim is better for when you are reading very low level passages with your more beginner classes.

Draw a scene:

Do you have some time to spare in your lesson plan? Do you want to do something that will use up all that time? Are you in a very lazy mood today? Then give your students a piece of paper and tell them to draw something representing the story. Maybe they’ll draw a specific scene, or maybe they’ll get very metaphorical with it. As long as they are able to voice (or write) what their drawing has to do with the reading, it’s fine.

Activities That Are Just For Fun:

Command:

In this activity whoever is reading out loud must follow the commands of whoever is in charge. First, write the commands their allowed to say on the board Here are some examples:

1. Again – read the last sentence again
2. Reverse- from wherever you are, start reading backwards word for word
3. Forward- read normally
4. Slowly- this and the other commands below are pretty self-explanatory
5. Quickly
6. Quietly
7. Loudly

I like this one, even though it’s really silly. It’s especially fun to do if what your reading is a dialogue between several characters and if your students are willing to read in front of the classroom standing up. That way it’s more like a performance at an improv show instead of a classroom reading. The more comfortable your class is, the more likely students will play along. If your class is too shy to follow commands, you can be the reader and have your students control you.

Emotive Reading:

This is another one that’s very fun for dialogues but can be done with normal reading as well. Simply write a bunch of emotions on strips of paper. Place them in a cup or hat and have the person reading grab one strip. They must read while performing the emotion, e.g., the reader pretends to cry while reading because they grabbed the word “sad”. After the reading is over, everyone guesses what emotion they had.

Another fun way to do this activity is to give the reader a character – something like “a grandma” or “a baby”. You can even simply give them character traits/quirks while reading such as “very shy” or “has the hiccups”. The more people you have taking turns to read, the more fun it is.