Great Classroom Games: Teacher Picks From Around The World (Part 2)

When students see how quickly time flies while having fun, it’s a cue for us to keep that energy by having one or two new game types ready to try out and allocating as much time as we can for classroom favorites.  

Welcome back for Part 2 of this two-part series on favorite language games in the primary ELT classroom. As Part 1 focused on games related to physical play and interaction for a hands-on meaningful experience, in Part 2, I explore flexible games that work well in a range of classroom contexts — from traditional in-person lessons to blended or online environments.

Flexible Games and How to Use Them

Flexible games offer a versatility that engages younger learners across different environments and technologies. Here, we’ll focus on puzzle games, video games, and online games, which can be designed for either recreational or educational purposes. In an ELT classroom, recreational games, designed primarily for fun, can be adapted to effectively develop specific language or communication skills.

Reminding younger learners of the classroom expectations can be especially helpful when introducing a new game on a new or existing platform. When routines are clear, games run well and stay on schedule, and everyone stays engaged. Here are some examples of classroom reminders that support engagement and minimize disruptions across delivery modes:

Discovering More Favorites From Around the World

While flexible games offer many advantages, it's worth looking at how each game type was perceived by teachers in the April-May 2025 survey featured in Part 1.  Puzzle games, video games, and online games were not selected as the top three favorites in the survey, but the results suggest that these types of games may still have untapped potential in the classroom.

Here is the pie chart again from Part 1 for reference, showing the vote frequencies where the preferred game types in the second category were ranked: puzzle games, video games, and online games.

Let's take a closer look at each game type.

Puzzle Games 🧩   

Puzzle games encourage students to apply their language skills to solve problems, complete patterns, or fill in missing information. In its recent blog post, Literacy Now provides examples of four recreational games offered by the New York Times that could be used in the language classroom. These games include Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, and Strands, which could be fun 5–10-minute activities for quick revision or active class breaks.

Any of these games can be brief or extended. From the survey, there were two educational games shared:

• • Information Gap, shared by a teacher in Thailand: “[I like using] games based on information-gap task [where] one learner has a piece of information and another learner has another piece of information. [They must] use the target language to collaboratively find information from their partners.”
  • Hanging Butterfly, shared by a teacher in Vietnam: “Students love to guess letters of unknown words. It helps them with phonetic skills and phonological skills. [Instead of “hangman,” where students draw a stick figure, they draw a butterfly.]”

If you would like to build your own puzzles, Brent Warner shares a range of puzzles you could create using Discovery Education for your younger learners in his blog titled Building Quick and Easy Word Puzzles. 

Video Games 🕹️

Video games are digital games typically played using a console, computer, or tablet. They are installed via software, downloaded online, or accessed through gaming platforms.

In a primary classroom with blended learning options, video games can be installed on library computers, in a classroom, and/or on student devices. There may be a list of approved educational games for students to install as apps on their devices to play offline. It would be worth including as part of literary rotations or activities as part of a weekly homework routine.

If you or the school have access to gaming consoles, age-appropriate recreational games can be a valuable resource for writing prompts or vocabulary learning.

For example, Mario Kart can be used for a writing prompt: After playing a round as a class, younger learners can write sentences or paragraphs about their shared Mario Kart experience individually or in pairs. You can use the twists and turns in the race as an opportunity to practice prepositional phrases or action verbs in sentences: e.g., “I sped down the ramp and raced around the curve” and “he flew over the jump to land on the track.”   

It is important to note that video games may also have additional online options included to enhance the overall gaming experience. These features are mentioned in the following section.

Online Games 🌐

Online games are played through web browsers or platforms connected to servers, often allowing real-time multiplayer interaction. These games create friendly competition between students, individually, in groups, or as a class. Like video games, online games work best in scheduled gametime or as an icebreaker, especially if the game has no time limit.

For educational games, there are a range of online games or apps designed for language learning and review with fixed timers. Kahoot and Quizizz (now called Wayground) were mentioned by a few teachers in the survey as favorites for vocabulary review games. Each quizzing platform uses game elements to create fun opportunities for learners to engage with language as a class or individually.

An example of an age-appropriate online game would be Minecraft Education. Maija Kozlova’s blog post for Cambridge English shares examples of how video games like Minecraft Education support meaningful learning. She effectively links digital gameplay to the five prerequisites for effective learning, which include: "meaningful context, authenticity, motivation, freedom to make mistakes, and learner autonomy”. If you would like to try including Minecraft Education as a class activity, Jeff Kuhn also shared Lesson Plans for Educators - Minecraft: Education Edition to show how there are a range of starter kits for teachers across different subjects.  

All in all, games have the potential to bring energy to the language classroom, and the best part is there are so many to choose from. The six game types from Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series are only some of the many games available. See what makes your younger learners excited about using the target language, because there’s no right or wrong way to play games if everyone follows the rules in the classroom and the game fits with your students' learning needs and lesson plan.

Happy Teaching and Learning!