10 consonant clusters games

It can take lots of very intensive practice until students can recognise and pronounce words like “springs” and “strikes” without adding or losing sounds. This article gives ten fun activities to give just that kind of really focused practice.

Consonant clusters list dictations

Students listen to a list of words and try to work out what they have in common, e.g. that they all start with “str” or that they all have only one syllable (if your students tend to pronounce them with too many). If this will be too easy with just consonant clusters, they can be mixed up with other tricky language points like words with “er/ur/ir” and words with “ar”.

After labelling a copy of the worksheet with those similarities, students can then get pronunciation practice of the words as they test each other in the same way.

Consonant clusters the same or different games

Make a list of words with consonant clusters and homophones of them (“steal” and “steel”) plus some examples where the words are similar but not the same (“super” and “spa”). Students listen to the pairs of words and race to hold up a card saying “The same” or a card saying “Different” based on the pronunciation of those words. The similar but different words could be ones with extra syllables in, ones with other consonant clusters (“spr” vs “spl”), etc. Students can then try to pronounce them as they test each other in the same way.

Instead of raising two cards, it’s also possible for students to raise one of two hands, point at cards saying “The same” and “Different”, run and touch the two cards, etc.

Consonant clusters call my bluff

Give students different words which they are unlikely to know but could be useful to learn and have particularly difficult combinations of initial and final consonant clusters such as “strains”, along with definitions of their meanings. The students make up words with the same consonant clusters but different other sounds such as “struns” or “strones”, and create fake definitions of those words. They then read out the real and made-up words, hoping to fool the other students about which one is real.

Consonant clusters strangers on a train

Give students different words with difficult consonant clusters and ask them to slip one or more into a conversation with a stranger. When the conversation finishes, they try to guess which word(s) their partner had to use. Students should hopefully work out that they can win by using lots of other words with consonant clusters to distract from the word(s) on their card.  

Perhaps as an extension, the same thing also works well with just a consonant cluster to use, e.g. a card saying “gr-” that means they could say “great”, “grand”, etc during the conversation.

Consonant clusters counting syllables games

Almost any game on counting syllables can be useful if your students can’t recognise or produce the correct number of syllables in words with consonant clusters (e.g. say “suturap” for “strap”). Possibilities include:

• racing to hold up cards with the number of syllables on (“One syllable” or “Two syllables”, etc)
• shouting out when the sentence or list of words has reached a certain total number of syllables (“Ten syllables!”)
• writing dialogues with fixed syllable patterns (e.g. each line of the conversation having one more syllable than the previous line)
• matching words with the same number of syllables (as pelmanism/ pairs, and/ or snap)
• finding their way through a maze by following the words with the same number of syllables (e.g. only two-syllable words)