3 Simple Activities with Post-It Notes

I love post-it notes and whenever I see a new set I feel the urge to buy some more. I use a lot of post-it notes mainly for mind-mapping and creative stages of my work (especially for creating courses and lessons). I also use them to mark interesting passages in the books I read – I simply abhor writing on books.

Anyway, I think post-it notes make a really nice teaching tool. They’re small, easy to carry around and you can use them with students on various levels. Here are my favourite simple, creative and of course no-prep ideas:

What’s on my back?

It’s a great activity not only to start a course, but to start your classes, especially on a rainy day. Just write some key words on the post-it notes and stick them to your students’ backs. Ask your students to identify the words by asking other students various questions however! They can only answer with yes, no or I don’t know. What key phrases you could use?:

• colours – that would be great for kids and lower levels
• simple nouns – you could adjust the difficulty to the group’s level
• famous people – that would require more advanced students. You can also introduce the variant of “famous couples” where your students would need to not only identify their post-its, but also find their partner
• synonyms/antonyms – a variation of a “famous people” activity, where you replace famous names with adjectives and the students need to find out what word they have on their back, and find their counterpart – a synonym or an antonym

Instant taboo maker

This is a simple no-prep activity and a variety of a well-known taboo game. Write some key words on a board. Divide your students into groups and ask them to write 5 words that would help define those words. Make a list of those most common “explanations” and use them to create simple taboo cards on post-it notes that you can use on the next lesson as a vocabulary review.

Mad Libs

First of all, you need to play some Mad Libs with your students – you will find great story generators at Redkid and Madtakes.

You will need four different colours of post-it notes to create this funny activity (one of my favourite ones). Divide your students into groups and ask them to write e.g. 5 nouns on yellow cards, 7 verbs on blue cards, 8 adjectives on green cards etc. Then ask them to write a simple story using those words, but not writing them down, and leaving some blanks with a reference to the grammar category used.

Then ask them to either read their stories aloud as a dictation, or swap them with other groups. Every group completes the other stories with their words to make their own silly story.

I hope you’ll like my ideas, but I’m sure you have your own – please share them in the comments.