10 Creative Learning Activities for Teens

Teenagers can be tricky customers when it comes to the classroom, but they don’t have to be! We’ve chosen some of our favourite activities to help turn your challenging group of teens into engaged and motivated learners.

Storytelling Sessions

Good for: Public speaking, listening, comprehension

Encourage students to create and share their own short stories in English. This activity can help improve their vocabulary and grammar whilst fostering creativity. You can even ask fast finishers to create some visuals to supplement their story.

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Debate Club

Good for: Public speaking, listening, critical thinking

Perfect for older students who are preparing for university or college level study, encourage them to participate in debates on current topics or global issues. Not only will this promote critical thinking skills, but also public speaking, listening, vocabulary expansion, and the ability to see from different perspectives.

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English Blogging

Good for: technology integration, STEM, writing

Why not bring technology to the classroom and set up a class blog? Students can write and publish articles, stories, or reflections in English. Digital literacy is vital in this modern era, and we’re sure teenagers spend hours upon hours scrolling through their phones anyway. So why not encourage something productive whilst also teaching safe use of social media?

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English Board Games

Good for: vocabulary, speaking, reading, listening

Use English board games like Scrabble or Pictionary to make learning new vocabulary fun and exciting. Heck, any board game works to get students speaking in English! Find a few you’ve got hidden away in that junk cupboard at home and bring them in to school.

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Comic Creations

Good for: creativity, storytelling, writing, reading

Anyone from primary to secondary can create comic strips; it’s fun, entertaining, and full of action and adventure. You can take the opportunity to teach social or emotional topics by asking students to create comics about something special to them, a great accomplishment, a best friend, their goals for the future etc.  It can be taken in any direction with older students!

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Kahoot!

Good for: vocabulary, spelling, grammar, summary

Technology integration in the classroom is all the rage nowadays, so why not add in some online quizzes to your lessons to make them more exciting? Teenagers these days are very likely to own mobile devices, and if your school allows you to use them in the classroom, students can enter a PIN on the Kahoot website and play along live.

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Who Am I?

Good for: speaking, review

A twist on the classic “20 questions” game… Write the name of any character or celebrity that students may know on a piece of paper, fold up, and place into a hat. One student will choose a character and must now answer questions as if they were that character. For lower-level students, write some question prompts on the board. Students must figure out who this person is.

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Lyrics Jigsaw

Good for: listening, teamwork

Although some preparation is required here, it’ll be totally worth it! Print out the lyrics to a well-known pop song that students may know, cut them into lines and mix them up. Hand the lines out to the class and ask students to work in groups by listening to the song and putting the lyrics back in the correct order. Students will be singing along in no time.

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A-Z Board Race

Good for: vocabulary, teamwork

For this great warmup activity, divide the class into teams and give them a large alphabet worksheet. Next, give them a topic (food, clothing, countries), and ask the teams to think of a word beginning with each letter of the alphabet. To make this game more interactive (and somewhat chaotic), have them run up to the front of the class one by one to add words to the board.

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MadLibs

Good for: writing, grammar, reading

Why not share this fun game with ESL students to practice their grammar? MadLibs involves a story that has blank words for you to fill in, such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Together as a class, brainstorm some parts of speech to use later, then fill in the blanks to make a hilarious story! You can find tons of MadLibs templates online.

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