Prepositions Stacking Game

Prepositions stacking game

Instructions for teachers

Photocopy and cut out the cards below that match the words you want to practise and that match objects you can find in or bring to your classroom, e.g. a Lego window or the real classroom window for “window” and a plastic plate for “plate”. Note that some of the cards provide different ways of saying the same thing, so you’ll probably want to choose the “next to” card or the “by” card (not both) and “big” or “large” and “little” or “small”. Depending on your class, you may also want to cut down on the number of words, e.g. eliminate some of the trickier prepositions.

If you don’t have enough objects that match the cards and/ or want to use different ones, you can make your own cards with the blanks below, but note that “a” won’t match words beginning with vowel sounds, so you might need to add an “an” card. Make one set of cards per class or group. There are several games which you can play with the objects and cards, all of which involve stacking objects to make towers until they fall over:

• A student chooses cards of something that they want to stack and its position and then try to add that to the tower
• A student chooses cards of something that they want the teacher or another student to stack and sees if the other person can do it
• A student chooses cards to describe something that should be stacked, secretly takes the “Yes” or “No” card depending on whether they think the next person can stack in that way or not, then show the “Yes” or “No” card after the attempt is made to show if they predicted correctly or not

Students can then say and/ or write their own phrases of ways of stacking.

 

Optional adjectives cards

big	little	large	small
red	blue	green	yellow
white	pink	brown	purple
_____	_____	_____	_____

 

Optional yes and no cards

YES

NO

  

Put the

 

in the

on the

under the

by the

next to the

in front of

behind

 

Object cards 

plate	frying pan
spoon	knife
cup	jug
lid	bottle
ruler	bowl
saucepan	block
bananas	giraffe
lion	zebra
pencil	pen
map	calendar
magnet	block
clock	CD
book	dog
window	car

 

Blank cards

__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________
__________	__________