What more entertaining way to help teach future tense than through fortune-telling, sugoroku-style?!
Split students into groups. Each group gets one sugoroku board and one die. They can use their erasers as counters for the game. Give one blank piece of paper for each student to write their fortunes on.
All students put their erasers on 'Start!'. The first player rolls the die and moves however many spaces the die says. They check what square they land on - these have some random possible future events/actions, like 'have a cat', 'be a doctor', etc.
Then, they roll the die a second time. The number they get on the die this time lets them know their fortune for the event/action they landed on.
The fortune will be either affirmative ('I am going to/will...'), probable ('I might...') or negative ('I'm not going to/won't...').
The following numbers indicate the following fortunes:
1 or 2: 'I am going to...' / 'I will...'
3 or 4: 'I might...'
5 or 6: 'I am not going to...' / 'I will not/won't...'
They must try and say their fortune as a full sentence first (for example 'I am going to play in a band', 'I might be a singer', 'I won't live in Tokyo', etc.). After that, they then write down the same sentence as one of their fortunes on their piece of paper. They continue writing a list of their fortunes for each turn they get in the game.
Rinse and repeat this process for each player. By the end of the activity, each student should have made a list of some pretty interesting fortunes of their future! Each time I've played this game, the kids go pretty nuts and get a real good laugh, so I'm sure this game idea will pique their interest :)
Of course, this is just a game, so it's definitely worth making a little disclaimer to the students to remind them that this is just for fun and so should just be taken lightly.
I must point out that this is a game idea I originally found on another ALT/English teaching activity website which sadly became defunct sometime last year, so I'm currently unable to provide any credit to the original creator nor website host of this game. About half of the events/actions on this sugoroku were sourced or inspired by the original document.
EDIT: I've added an edited version with some different, easier vocab (Word and PDF formats, marked with 'EDIT') in case some of the vocab used in the original version might be a bit challenging.
This is great! Do you have a version that can be edited? I would love to use use this activity but I think some vocabulary might be too difficult for my students.
Yep, not a problem! I just submitted the same activity in its exact Word document format, so you can easily edit it now :)
Now that you mention it, I think I might try and edit some of the vocab to be honest. Some of them do seem a bit more difficult than I thought while making it, so I might just do that
This looks super fun, thank you so much for this!
@robertsbp Not a problem! Hope the students enjoy it :)
Thanks for sharing this activity. This is awesome.
＠akopoito No probs! :) And thanks so much!
This is really, really great. All my students, low and high level, adored this. The JTEs and ALTs love this as well. So thank you!
＠ashtoneleanorjp It's all good! I'm so happy to hear that that your students and JTEs/ALTs really like it! Thank you so much!! :)
My students loved this! Thank you so much!