Are you looking for an easy way to engage learners that doesn’t take a lot of effort and that you can whip up in no time at all? Dice are your answer! Create easy activities that students only need dice for, or for which they need dice and few other components, and you’re good to go! In this blog post, I will tell you what fun things you can do to engage learners with dice!
Sometimes you just need a quick game or activity to activate your students, or to just let them have a bit of fun in between learning tasks. I found that among other things – like whiteboard markers, QR codes, and sticky notes – dice are amazing for this! A few years ago, I found a pack of very colorful dice in a dollar store, and I knew I had to do something with them in my lessons. Now I use them all the time, so they’re always in my bag. Let me tell you why!
How to motivate and engage learners
My students already get excited when they see the dice laying on my desk because they know that we’re going to either play a game or do a fun activity or something like that and they love it! They usually want to start off the lesson with that activity, which we mostly won’t, but at least they are already excited for what is to come. It really motivates them to do well that lesson!
How to engage learners using dice
So what do I do with them? Here are my ideas:
- Board games
- Writing prompts
- Speaking prompts
- Brain break activities
- Roll the letter for 5 vocabulary words
Board games
Pass each small group a die, a board game and game pieces for each student in the group. I love board games about grammar topics myself! Students need to roll the dice and answer the question in the box they land on. For example, in a Present Perfect board game, they would have to answer the question: ‘Have you ever eaten snails?’ or ‘What is the best present you’ve ever received?’ This helps them use the tense, or other grammar points, in action. I’ve created board games for all the tenses and they are for sale in my store.
Writing prompts
This one takes a few minutes to start, but you can easily ask students for help. Come up with 6 words in each of these three categories: character, setting, and object. Write them on the whiteboard. Then pass each small group a die. Each student needs to roll the dice 3 times in order to get one word in each category. They must then use those words in a story of their own making! You could also have them roll twice for each category to have more words to use.
If you think this is too much of an effort: I’ve created a bunch of no-prep roll-the-dice writing prompts sheets, which you can find here in my store.
Speaking prompts
Come up with at least 6 questions you want students to discuss in their groups and put them up on the board. Have them roll the dice. The number of the question that corresponds with what’s on the dice is the question they must answer. If you want them to answer more than one question, just have them keep on rolling. You could come up with questions about topics such as hobbies, or school life, or more advanced ones like history and politics. You could do different rounds with new questions as well.
Teacher’s Pitstop has some great ones!
Brain break activities
Come up with at least 6 moves, like ‘jump 10 times’, ‘box the sky’, ‘do jumping jacks’, ‘touch your toes 5 times’, etc. More is better, because this activity goes quite fast. Number them and put them up on the board. Have one student roll the dice. The number they land on is the move the whole class must do! Come up with more advanced or intricate moves to challenge students. You could have students roll two dice to get to moves 7 to 12.
Roll the Letter for vocabulary practice
First, write down all the letters of the alphabet on the board and number them 1 to 26. Use four dice. Have a student roll all four dice. The combined number of dots on these dice is the letter your students must use. Tell them to write down 5 vocabulary words starting with this letter. Then roll again for a new letter. Give them a category to make this more difficult, like ‘clothes’, ‘jobs’, or ‘school’, or words with a certain suffix, like ‘-ment’ or ‘-able’.
Manage classroom structure to engage learners
Now, in order to play these dice activities, you need to have a certain classroom management structure down. You don’t want students to get all rowdy or out of control while you play the aforementioned games. The goal is to engage learners, not rile them up.
What’s important is to clearly instruct students on what you want them to do. Do you want them to pack up everything else? Tell them. Do you want them to move their desks into a certain position? Be clear about it. Next, make sure when the activity starts and when it ends. Take visible control before and after the activity, and provide a clear beginning and end to it by concluding what the class just did.
If you do these things, dice activities are super great for engagement, and they are super easy to organize off the cuff. I hope you’ll try some of these out! I’m sure you’ll enjoy them so much, and so will your students!
If you are looking for other ways to have some quick and easy fun in your classroom, check out this article that is all about that!
No time to check out another article? Try these Whiteboard Marker Games right now!
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