Name 3 Things That… Travel Edition: Tic-Tac-Toe Speaking Game

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Tic-tac-toe is about to become your favourite speaking activity. Yes, that game you used to play on the back of your notebook during maths!

Add a poster, a timer and one rule (“you have to justify everything”), and suddenly your quietest students are arguing about why they’d never travel by coach. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve seen it happen!

Step 1: Make your own poster (in one minute)

You’ve probably seen the “Name 3 things that…” posters floating around. They’re brilliant, but they’re generic. For a lesson on travelling I wanted prompts, doodles and colours that fit my topic. So I made my own with Gemini.

Here’s the prompt I used. Copy it, paste it, tweak it:

A vertical infographic educational poster for adult English learners, clean layout with high contrast, white background. At the very top, large playful handwritten title: “Name 3 things that…” with a smaller neat subtitle below reading “www.cristinacabal.com”. Underneath the title, a regular 3×5 grid composed of exactly 15 distinct, rounded-corner rectangular blocks in a vibrant, balanced palette of warm coral, mustard yellow, deep teal, olive green, and terracotta. Each card contains clear, legible, clean handwritten typography with travel-themed prompts, paired with whimsical, colorful hand-drawn doodle illustrations (such as a passport, backpack, compass, aeroplane, vintage suitcase, map, coffee cup, camera, train ticket). Hand-drawn sketch style, charming felt-tip and ink linework, subtle watercolor texture accents, educational poster design, professional graphic illustration, aspect ratio 2:3, clean vector-style aesthetic, highly readable, crisp details –ar 2:3 –v 6.1

Step 2: The game

Download the board here

Print one board per pair, and put a timer on the screen where the whole class can see it. A big countdown adds a bit of pressure, and that’s exactly what we want! I use ClassroomScreen

The aim is simple: get a line of 3 squares in a row. Horizontal, vertical or diagonal.

  • Students work in pairs.
  • One is X, the other is O. You can use different coloured counters, coins, paper clips or little scraps of paper to mark squares. Anything goes!

How to win a square

  1. Pick a square. Say it’s “could persuade you to travel solo”.
  2. Now name 3 things. But here’s the catch: just listing them doesn’t count. You have to develop and justify all three ideas, fluently, for 90 seconds, they will have to talk nonstop

  3. Do all that and the square is yours.

The listener (the other student)  isn’t just sitting there

The listener isn’t a passive audience. They’re the timekeeper and the judge.

    • They time the speaker.
    • If the speaker stops early, just lists random items with no explanation, or hits a proper communication block, the listener shouts “Buzz!”
    • Buzz means no square. The turn passes straight to the other student and the square stays open for anyone to claim later.

Winning and rematches

The first to complete a line of 3 wins the round. Then wipe the board, swap who starts, and play again, starting from a different corner of the grid.

Red Pen Retirement: Students Self-Assessing their Writing

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I love a red pen ( I use pencil, but you know what I mean)  as much as the next teacher. But last week I left mine in the drawer.

Why? Just ask yourselves. How many times have you spent a whole evening marking a pile of essays from your students, handed them back, and watched students look at the mark, nod, and stuff the paper into a bag? Yeah. Me too.

So this time I wanted them to do the spotting.

The task: Guided Writing.

My B2 group got this as homework:

Write an email responding to an online ad for a room in a shared apartment. You must introduce yourself, explain why you are a great fit using two positive personality traits, and confess one negative trait.

To soften the negative adjective,

1. Use language of tendency instead of the verb to be.Target Structures: I tend to be…, I have a tendency to…, I can occasionally come across as…

2. Use modifiers (e.g., slightly indecisive, a bit stubborn, somewhat forgetful).

Write 100-120 words

Why I didn’t want to correct it

If I only circle grammar and vocabulary, students decide that’s all writing is. But at B2 there’s so much more going on. Does the email actually answer the ad? Is the tone right for someone you’ve never met? Did they hit the word count? Did they really use the target structures? Do the sentences connect, or is it a list of separate ideas?

I wanted them to find that out on their own.

The rubric (and a confession)

On the day they handed in the task, they scored their own email with a rubric. In Spanish, on purpose. I want zero doubt about what “cohesion” or “task achievement” means, so the descriptors are in the language they think in.

And I didn’t write it. Gemini did, in about five minutes. This is what I did:

  1. Told Gemini the level, the task, the target structures and the word count.
  2. Asked for a self-assessment rubric in Spanish that students can use on their own work.
  3. Asked for a PDF ready to download.
  4. Read it properly and asked for tweaks where the criteria weren’t quite what I wanted.

How I used it in Class

I printed the rubric, one copy per student. Then we went through it together, out loud, item by item, so everybody understood what each descriptor meant before they touched their own writing.

After that, it was their turn:

  1. Read your email again with the rubric in front of you.
  2. Look at the first two columns only: “Needs work” and “Achieved”.
  3. For each item, put a cross (or circle the square) in the column that best describes your email.
  4. Leave the last column empty. That one is mine! I told them it’s for the teacher to decide, so they could be honest without worrying about “the final verdict”.

Why only two columns? Because deciding “is this good enough yet?” is a much easier question than “how good is it exactly?”. It kept the task simple, and it meant they could focus on spotting what was missing rather than giving themselves a mark.

What happened

Surprised. That’s the word. Most of them had never been handed a rubric and told “you mark it”. You could see the wait, what? on their faces.

And a bit overwhelmed, too. There were a lot of boxes to tick, and many of them were things nobody had ever asked them to look at: tone, organisation, whether they’d actually used the structures. I think they hadn’t realised how much goes into a good email besides getting the grammar right.

But that was exactly the point. They went away with a much bigger picture of what “B2 writing” means, and I didn’t have to say a word.

Personality Adjectives at B2: From Word Cloud to Bingo (with a Little Help from AI)

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Has this ever happened to you? You’re chatting with your B2 students about personality, and someone proudly announces, “I’m very sensible!” Wait, do they mean sensitive? Or do they really mean they’re a model of good judgement? Chaos!

Personality adjectives look so easy on paper. They already know loads of them, right? And then the false friends sneak in and everything gets messy. That’s exactly why I love this topic. You can talk about yourself, have a laugh, get to know your classmates, and hunt down those sneaky mistakes all in one go.

Here’s how I do it, step by step. Let’s get into it!

Step 0: The coursebook

I start the way most of us do. We open the book, look at the adjectives in the unit, say them out loud, and chat about what they mean. Nothing fancy. Think of it as the warm-up before the real fun

Step 1: Build a word cloud

Now, they close their books and  I want all the adjectives they can remember from the book.  You’ve got two options here:

  • The classic way: students shout out words and you write them on the board in a cloud shape. Old school, but it works every time.
  • The lazy-teacher way (that’s me, I’m a bit lazy when it comes to writing on the board!): I use Wooclap, which has a free version. I  create the activity in Wooclap, show the QR code, students send their adjectives from their phones, and the cloud builds itself on screen. The more times a word is sent, the bigger it gets.

Two minutes later and the board (or the screen) is full of vocabulary

Step 2: Spotting the false friends

With the cloud in front of us, it’s time to zoom in on the adjectives that love to trip us up. My usual suspects:

  • sensitive vs. sensible
  • considerate vs. thoughtful

How do I explain them without spending my whole evening making slides? I let AI do the heavy lifting:

  1. I open Gemini and ask it to explain the difference between these four adjectives.
  2. Once I’m happy with the explanation, I ask it to build an HTML presentation with multiple-choice questions and gap-fill exercises.
  3. Done! A ready-to-project presentation with theory and practice included.

And because the words come from the cloud they created, it all feels much closer to them.

Step 3: Personality bingo

Time to play! Each student draws a 6-square bingo grid and fills it with adjectives from the cloud that describe them:

  • 4/5 positive ones
  • 1/2 negative ones

Yes, negative too. Honesty hour has officially begun! 😄

I have a bag ready with all the adjectives written on little papers. I pull them out one by one and, instead of just saying the word, I define it or give the opposite . Students have to work out which adjective I mean, and if it’s in their grid, they cross it off.

 The first student to complete the cross off all the adjectives in their grid,calls “Bingo!” The teacher verifies the card before awarding a prize ( a sweet?)

Step 4: Let’s talk!

Now we reach the speaking part, which is where everything clicks. Every student has chosen six adjectives to describe themselves, so they have to tell their classmates why:

  • Why did you choose “easy-going”?
  • Can you give me an example of a time you were stubborn?

To help them sound richer, I hand out an infographic with adjective modifiers: fairly, quite, rather, pretty, extremely… Because saying I’m shy isn’t the same as saying I’m fairly shy or I’m rather shy, is it? Suddenly they sound way more natural.

Little secret: I make this infographic with ChatGPT. For now it’s the best one for the job because it doesn’t hallucinate typographically.

Step 5: Writing. Homework

This is what they”ll have to do this weekend.  Keep posted if you want to know how I am planning to correct it!

Write an email responding to an online ad for a room in a shared apartment. You must introduce yourself, explain why you are a great fit using two positive personality traits, and confess one negative trait.

To soften the negative adjective,

1. Use language of tendency instead of the verb to be.Target Structures: I tend to be…, I have a tendency to…, I can occasionally come across as…

2. Use modifiers (e.g., slightly indecisive, a bit stubborn, somewhat forgetful).

Write 100-120 words

Wrapping up

In just one session, your students have reviewed vocabulary, cleared up false friends, played a game, spoken, and added nuance like proper B2 learners.

So next time personality adjectives come up in your syllabus, give this a go.

Fun Retrieval with The race letter and a Gallery Walk

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Right, personality adjectives are still on the menu, but stick with me here — this activity ‘ The Race LETTER is way more flexible than that. Fancy doing it with  some other topic-specific vocab for an exam class? Works just as well.

PART 1: The Race Letter

Picture this: your students are lined up in the aisle (or better yet, out in the corridor if you’ve got the space), each holding a blank piece of paper. You call out a letter – any letter – and they’ve got  20 seconds to  think of a personality adjective starting with that letter and scribble it down.

  • Get it right? Take a step forward.
  • Blank or wrong? Stay right where you are.

Decide how many steps ( in my case, 5 steps) they need to take before reaching the goal and That’s it! . That’s the whole game!.

How to Run It (Step-by-Step)
  • Set the scene. Line students up along the aisle between desks, or – if you’ve got the luxury of space – take them out to the corridor. This works brilliantly as an “outside the classroom” activity, and trust me, that change of scenery alone gets them buzzing.
  • Hand out paper. One blank sheet each. No prep, no printing needed.
  • Call out a letter. Start easy – think A, S, C – letters with loads of adjective options.
  • Give them 20 seconds. Enough time to think, not enough time to overthink.
  • Check answers. Walk down the line (or have them hold papers up) and check who’s got a valid personality adjective.
  • Move the winners forward. Correct answer = one step forward. Wrong or blank = stay put.
  • Repeat with a new letter each round.
  • First to reach the end wins.
A Few Tips From Trial and Error
  • Set the ground rules up front: does “kind” count for K, or are you asking for something a bit more B2-level, like knowledgeable? Decide your difficulty level before you start, and be consistent.
  • Keep a mental list of adjectives per letter.

Part Two: Turning the Adjectives Into a Gallery Walk

This is a teacher-guided activity. Allow about 5 minutes per station and tell students when to move to the next. At each station, students will have to do different things.

HOW TO DO IT

Take some of the most useful adjectives that came up and stick them up around the walls of your classroom, spaced out so students naturally move from one to the next. Then send your students off on a gallery walk:every time they move to a new spot, they’ll find two or three adjectives waiting for them, and a little task to go with each stop.

Here are some ideas to fill those stations with. At each station, I would ask them to do a different speaking tasks with the adjectives.

  1. Station 1. Speaking: Can you think of someone who fits one of these adjectives? Students talk in groups
  2. Station 2.Opposite hunt. Ask students to guess the opposite of each adjective.Speaking: Do you identify with any of these adjectives?
  3. Station 3. Rate yourself. A quick 1–5 scale for each adjective: how much does this adjective describe you?
  4. Station 4.Sentence starters. Ask students to complete the following sentence using one of the adjectives on the wall. “The most ______ person I know is…”

You can use my presentatio or say/write the questions on the board

Confession Time: I’m Useless With Names (So I Invented a Game That Reviews Vocab and Grammar Too)

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Okay, I’ll confess: we’re in the first days of the new course and I, the teacher, cannot for the life of me remember half my students’ names. Does this happen to you too? That moment when you point at someone and go “hey… you, yes, you, the one in the blue hoodie” because the name has completely vanished from your brain. A classic September moment. Well, and in my case, February moment, too.

So I started turning it over in my head (because yes, I have that habit of mine of turning any everyday problem into a classroom activity, it’s a blessing and a curse in equal measure) and I came up with something that kills two birds with one stone: we learn names AND we review grammar and vocabulary. Yay! Because why settle for one thing when you can have both, right?

And guess how I’m going to run it? Exactly how I like it: mixing tech and old-school tradition. Not fully digital, not fully analogue, a bit of both. But hey!!! You don’t like tech. It can all be done in the traditional way.

VOCABULARY ACROSTIC DUEL

Objective: learning students’ names and revising grammar and vocabulary.

Setting it up

  • A WordCloud. Split the class into two teams and create two word clouds, one per team, with the names of their members. You can do this by hand on the board or you can bring in the tech like I do (because for this bit, I admit I’m a little lazy) and use Wooclap to generate the cloud on the spot. Well, two clouds, one per team,
  • A buzzer. Some noise? Yes! Each team needs a buzzer within reach. A real buzzer, one of those that goes “ding!” and gives the whole thing that game-show feel that hooks everyone instantly.
How to play

(click on the image)

  1. Pick a student’s name at random from either word cloud (it doesn’t matter which team they’re on).
  2. Assign a challenge or if you use my wheel above, spin the wheel: for example, each letter has to be a past tense verb, or a descriptive adjective. You’ve got total freedom here to adapt it to whatever grammar point you’re working on.

An example with the name LUCAS and past tense verbs

  • L – Learned
  • U – Understood
  • C – Called
  • A – Asked
  • S – Saw

3.  Within each team, students can work solo, in pairs, or in groups of three, whatever       they prefer.

4. As soon as someone finishes the acrostic, they hit the buzzer.Let’s say it is a student from Team A.  If it’s correct, their team wins the round and  crosses out a name from Team B’s  cloud,  and picks the next name plus the next grammar or lexical category.

NOTE: If the student from Team A makes a mistake, then the other team wins (Team B) wins and crosses out a name from Team A’s cloud

And so, round after round, and without even realizing it, they’re repeating names over and over while working on structure and vocabulary. By the end of the class, I promise even I’ll have picked up a few more names.