Hangman for Introducing Vocabulary

(TESOL Ideas--Any Vocabulary Set)

I just did this for a vocabulary lesson, and it worked relatively well, so I thought I'd make a note of it here on this blog so I don't forget it in the future.

This is pretty much the same idea as the "Hangman for Grammar" activity that I posted years ago.  But I used it to introduce new vocabulary words.

As I noted in my Hangman for Grammar post: 

 Also, no one gets “hung” in my version—2 teams compete against each other.  One team guesses a letter, and this team will get a point for each time that letter appears in the sentence.  Then it’s the other team’s turn.  (This may actually be closer to “Wheel of Fortune” than to “Hangman”, but I find if I say “We’re going to play hangman today,” then the students instantly know what you’re talking about, so I still use that name, and then introduce the variations.)

...same idea here.  I'm calling it "hangman", but there isn't actually a man who gets hung.  It's just blanks on the board, and the students get points for guessing letters correctly.  

Let me illustrate by example.  Last week, I was called in at the last minute to cover a class.  According to the curriculum time table, the lesson I needed to do was vocabulary input for the words "country, dream, hero, kill, mask, mice, poster, prince, silent, start".  (These are all from English World 4, Unit 5).  Because it was a last minute cover, I had no time to prepare a presentation for the presentation stage of the lesson.  So, I just thought of a few different sentences using those vocabulary words, and put the blanks up on the board, and had the students guess the letters.

So, for example, the first sentence was:

"In my dream, the silent prince killed ten mice." (target vocabulary was dream, silent, prince, and mice).  Then I wrote the blanks up on the board (e.g. _ _  _ _  _ _ _ _ _, _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _   _ _ _ _.)

Then, the class was divided into two teams.  The teams took turns guessing letters.  After they guessed a letter, they got one point for each time that letter appeared.  (e.g. the letter "m" would get three points because it appears in my, dream and mice.) 

If a team was ready to solve the puzzle, and guess the whole thing, then it could get 10 extra points.

Once the sentence had been established on the board, I checked the meaning of the target vocabulary using eliciting questions, concept checking questions, and pictures from a Google images search.  (e.g. "What is a prince?  Who is his father?  Does Vietnam have a prince?  Can the silent prince talk? etc)

Because there were 10 vocabulary words that I had to input, I needed to do a few different sentences in order to get all of them. (e.g. "The silent hero wears a mask on the movie poster", and "Does the country of Vietnam have a prince?")  But the students enjoyed the game, so engagement was high.