ESOL English game - dice, vocabulary and grammar - JET programme

Hey there,
I thought I would share with you all the most successful game I made for my Japanese High School's English Conversation class. In every English lesson I have an activity or game that helps to teach the targeted English. Whenever you are teaching a foreign language it is great to get the students using it in a fun way, and make a good teaching environment. This game in particular really succeeded in waking the students up, they actually became quite excited to play it. Let me tell you how to works...

Well, I call this one "dice, vocabulary and grammar" for a reason. It is pretty much exactly that.

The goal:  Review/Practice recent grammar and vocabulary that has been taught in the classroom.
Required: Dice. I gave each team 2 dice (you can probably pick up at a 100 yen store). A set of cards (printed if you like) with vocabulary on them.
Class size, etc: I played this game in a class of about 16 students (senior high school students). I think it could be easily scaled up. You would have to have more vocab and bigger teams however. I think if you make the number of teams close to the size of teams (e.g. 5 teams with 5 in a team) then that'll work better.

How it goes: So this is how my class went down... My class had just learned about weekend activities (going to the gym, watching TV, etc), so I based it on this. I made some vocab cards from the different activities e.g. "watch T.V.". As I said, I had about 16 students. I broke them into 4 groups. Make sure that each team gets about 4-5 vocab cards (scale up/down if needed). Each team gets 2 dice.
So how it works is: 1 or 2 students from each team stay at their table and all the other students will go to other teams tables to try and take vocab cards from them. To steal a vocab card from another team a student must ask a question (based on the grammar/content you are trying to learn). For example "Did you watch TV this weekend?". If the team being asked the question has the vocab for "watch TV" then they must hand it over and say "Yes, I watched TV in the weekend". The student then takes it back to their team. However, before they are allowed to ask the question they must roll the dice. If the student who wants to ask the question win the roll, they may ask. If not, then they must continue on to another group. Whatever team has the most vocab cards in the end wins (time of this activity is decided by you).

Note: This may need translation into Japanese if the students don't understand (which is likely). Ensure you explain the game adequately to your Japanese Teacher of English (JTE).

The dice roll makes the game exciting because of the element of chance. This game works great to teach the grammar and vocab that class is currently working on. It can pretty much be adapted to any targeted grammar or vocab list.

If you ever try it, leave me a comment and let me know how it went. If it works any well, it might just be one that you can print off and save for those surprise classes you will probably receive ;)