Hangman

A secret word is shown as dashes, one per letter. Students guess letters; wrong guesses fill in a stick figure. Everyone knows it. The pedagogical question is what word you pick and what students do after guessing.

Procedure

1. Choose a word from the current lesson. Draw one dash per letter.
2. Students call out letters. Correct ones go in the blanks; wrong ones add to the figure.
3. After the word is solved, students do something with it: write a sentence, find its stress, use it in a follow-up question, or connect it to another word on the board.
4. Student wins the round → that student picks the next word.

Why Choose Well

Hangman's value is not the game itself; it's the spaced reinforcement of target vocabulary. A bad word choice wastes the slot:

Good choice	Why
Word with unexpected spelling	knee, doubt, rhyme
Word learners keep misspelling	Whatever keeps recurring
Word containing a target phoneme	for a pronunciation lesson
A collocation partner	Prompt: this word goes with "make"

Variations

• Collocation hangman: the teacher reveals one half of a collocation; students guess the other.
• Category hangman: announce the category (a verb meaning "start"), then play.
• Student-led: students choose words from a stack you've curated.
• Live-word challenge: once solved, the guesser must use the word correctly in a sentence or lose the point.
• No-killing version: swap the stick figure for drawing a flower, a house, or anything neutral if the traditional graphic feels inappropriate.

Tips

• Never use it for unknown vocabulary — hangman tests what students already know. It is review, not input.
• Limit games to 2–3 words per session. The novelty wears off fast.
• Track who guessed the last letter; rotate the "picker" to distribute ownership.