The ELA Games | Back to School Middle High ELA Full-Year Team Building Program

Looking for a year-long ELA classroom engagement system that keeps students motivated from the first week of school to the last? The ELA Games transforms your classroom into an ongoing team competition where students earn points, complete standards-aligned ELA challenges, climb the leaderboard, unlock rewards, and work together toward becoming classroom champions. Rather than relying on occasional review games or isolated activities, this classroom engagement system creates a sense of purpose and excitement that carries throughout the entire year. Best of all, it works alongside the curriculum you're already teaching, making it easy to build strong classroom community, increase participation, and make everyday ELA lessons something students genuinely look forward to.


How This Full-Year ELA Games Classroom Engagement Program Works:

1. Introduce The ELA Games to Your Students: A few weeks into the school year, once you've had a chance to get to know your students, use the included introductory presentation to launch The ELA Games. The presentation walks students through how the program works while building excitement and anticipation for the challenges ahead.

2. Create Your Teams: At the beginning of the program, students are divided into balanced teams that stay together throughout the semester or school year. Students create their own team name, colors, mascot, team flag, and motto.

3. Complete ELA Challenges: Throughout the year, teams participate in two different types of challenges:

• 20 Core Challenges & Games: These are larger, full-class, curriculum-based lessons that naturally fit into your existing ELA instruction. They cover important skills like reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, poetry, drama, figurative language, writing, and more while incorporating a fun game or competitive challenge. The challenges include instruction on the skills, teacher instructions, all the student materials needed for the challenge, and detailed answer keys.
  
  
• 20 Bonus Challenges & Games: These are shorter, high-energy activities that are perfect for bell-ringers, exit tickets, review days, Fun Fridays, brain breaks, or whenever you have a few extra minutes. They continue reinforcing ELA skills while also building collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
  
  
• 15 Spirit Challenges: These challenges encourage students to communicate, plan ahead, and work together outside of the challenges. At the end of class, announce a simple mission for the following day. For example, you might award Spirit Points to the team with the most members dressed in the same color, the most members who remembered to bring their library book, or the most members who greeted you as they entered the classroom, etc.

4. Earn Points: Students receive points for the challenges above, but they can also earn points for positive contributions and for meeting classroom expectations: 

• Individual Points: Awarded to a student's team to celebrate individual achievements and positive contributions. This could be recognizing a student on a team for showing kindness, demonstrating leadership, helping a classmate, etc. It could also celebrate moments outside of school like scoring the winning goal at a sports game, performing in the talent show, or any other accomplishment worth celebrating.
  
  
• Team Points: Awarded as a classroom management tool to reinforce the classroom habits you want to encourage outside of the challenge days. For example, you might reward the team with the highest percentage of assignments handed in on time, the best collaboration during group work, the strongest participation in class discussions, the most organized workspaces, or any other classroom management issue you are working on.

5. Climb the Leaderboard: As teams earn points, they move up the classroom leaderboard. Students can track their team's progress throughout the year, making every challenge and every point feel like part of something bigger.

6. Unlock Rewards & Celebrate Success: Throughout the year, teachers can recognize teams that demonstrate positive qualities like collaboration, leadership, kindness, perseverance, or sportsmanship by awarding classroom rewards, privileges, recognition, or badges. These celebrations help keep students motivated and reinforce the behaviours that build a strong classroom community. Rewards might include choosing their seats for the day, earning a homework pass, enjoying a small treat, listening to music while they work, or another classroom privilege.

7. Crown the Champions: At the end of the semester or school year, celebrate everything your students have accomplished with an end-of-year party and awards ceremony. Recognize every team for its unique strengths before crowning the championship team and celebrating them as the winners of The ELA Games.

Included in The Full-Year ELA Games Program:

➡️ Complete Teacher Guide: You'll receive a comprehensive implementation guide that walks you through every step of setting up and running The ELA Games. From creating balanced teams and setting up your leaderboard to awarding points and celebrating your champions, you'll have everything you need to confidently launch the program in your classroom. The teacher guide includes space for teachers to plan out and make decisions about how they want to implement the program.

➡️ Complete Team Set Up Materials: Everything you need to organize your classroom into teams, including editable team materials, printable team resources, and activities that allow students to create their own team identities.

➡️ ELA Games Launch Presentation: Introduce The ELA Games with an engaging slideshow that explains exactly how the competition works and gets students excited to begin.

➡️ 20 Core ELA Challenges & Lessons: These full-class curriculum-based challenges naturally fit into your existing instruction while covering important ELA standards such as reading comprehension, grammar, figurative language, vocabulary, writing, poetry, drama, and more. Each challenge includes an instructional slideshow in PowerPoint or Google Slides format to teach the ELA skill or concept, teacher instructions for implementing the challenge, and all the challenge materials you need to implement the game.

➡️ 20 Bonus ELA Challenge Slides: Keep the momentum going all year long with quick, high-energy activity slides in PowerPoint and Google Slides format that you can use during part of a class, as a bell-ringer challenge, as a Friday fun competition, or as an exit activity. These activities continue reinforcing reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, grammar, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking skills. Each of these challenges is simply on a slide, so students complete all the work on looseleaf in their challenge binder. These are absolutely no prep! Simply project the challenge, and you are ready to go!

➡️ 15 Spirit Challenge Slides: Ready-to-use slides with fun, low-pressure team mission slides in PowerPoint and Google Slides format that encourage students to communicate, plan ahead, work together, and earn bonus Spirit Points throughout the year.

➡️ Individual & Team Point Idea Bank: A ready-to-use collection of ideas for recognizing positive behaviours, classroom habits, teamwork, leadership, kindness, participation, and more.

➡️ Leaderboard Poster Set Up & Point System: Create excitement throughout the year with a printable leaderboard, suggested point systems, team ranking cards, classroom rewards ideas, and flexible scoring options that allow you to customize the competition to fit your classroom.

➡️ End of the Year ELA Games Awards Certificates: Celebrate every team's accomplishments with a collection of 8 end-of-the-year awards. In addition to crowning your overall ELA Games Champions, you'll also recognize teams for their unique strengths with certificates for qualities such as Creativity, Teamwork, Leadership, Resilience, Team Spirit, Sportsmanship, and more, ensuring every team has something to be proud of as they reflect on their year together.

The 20 Full-Lesson & Core ELA Challenges:

📖 Literary Analysis:

• Theme Auction Challenge: Teams analyze manuscripts, identify the strongest theme, strategically bid on theme cards, and manage a limited budget to build the strongest collection.
• Hollywood Conflict Studio Challenge: Teams step into the role of Hollywood executives, identifying the primary and secondary conflicts in movie pitches before deciding which films deserve to be greenlit.
• Football Character Draft Challenge: Teams analyze player profiles, gather evidence about character traits, and draft the athletes they believe are the best fit for each football organization.
• Roller Coaster Plot Diagram Challenge: Teams analyze story summaries, identify each stage of the plot, and match every story to the roller coaster blueprint that best represents its plot diagram.
  

🎭 Speaking, Listening & Communication:

• Scene Stealers Drama Challenge: Teams transform the same cafeteria mystery into scripts from different genres, then perform their scenes to demonstrate how genre shapes a story and its audience.
• Soup, Salad, or Sandwich Debate Challenge: Teams develop a food classification system, debating and defending whether each food is best classified as a soup, salad, or sandwich.

📚 Reading Skills:

• Author's Purpose AI Inbox Investigator Challenge: Teams race to analyze AI-generated emails, identify each author's purpose (persuade, inform, or entertain), and explain the evidence before the competition ends.
• Alien Text Evidence Challenge: Teams investigate the mysterious Zoraxians, analyze evidence from multiple sources, and use text evidence to determine whether Earth should approve their visit.
• Missing Principal Inference Mystery: Teams analyze crime scene evidence, witness statements, and suspect profiles to make evidence-based inferences, eliminate suspects, and solve the mystery.
• Zoo Exhibit Main Idea Challenge: Teams identify the main idea and supporting details of animal passages to curate engaging zoo exhibits that accurately teach visitors about each featured animal.
• Figurative Language Escape Room: Teams rotate around the room solving figurative language puzzles to unlock clues, crack a final code, and escape the room before time runs out.
• Poetry Museum Curator Challenge: Teams analyze poems and match them with paintings that best reflect their literary elements, themes, and overall meaning before the museum exhibit opens.
• Zombie Vocabulary Challenge: Teams race to survive a zombie outbreak by making strategic decisions, collecting survival supplies, and correctly applying vocabulary words to escape before it's too late.

✍️ Writing:

• Word Choice Video Game Challenge: Teams strengthen a video game pitch by replacing weak language with vivid, precise word choices that persuade investors to fund the game.
• Paragraph Writing Burger Builder Challenge: Teams organize mixed-up burger recipes by identifying the topic sentence, supporting details, and concluding sentence before assembling well-organized paragraphs.
• Million Dollar Business Pitch Persuasive Writing Challenge: Teams develop persuasive pitches for business ideas, using strong evidence, reasoning, and persuasive techniques to convince investors to fund their invention.

📝 Language & Grammar:

• Capitalization Pirate Treasure Hunt Challenge: Teams use their capitalization skills to decode a pirate's journal, uncover clues, solve riddles, and discover the location of a legendary hidden treasure.
• Punctuation Shootout Challenge: Teams compete through ten rounds of punctuation challenges, earning points and bonus halftime shots by making accurate corrections under pressure.
• Grammar Spy Academy Game: Teams complete grammar assessments in this high-stakes Jeopardy-style game, earning intelligence points as they compete to graduate from Spy Academy as elite agents.
• Grammar Hospital Sentence Surgery Challenge: Teams work as medical specialists, diagnosing and correcting grammar errors to successfully cure their patient's grammatical ailments.

The 20 Shorter Bonus ELA Challenges:

• Marshmallow Tower Engineering Challenge
• Rebus Puzzle Challenge
• Mystery Object Riddles
• Say What? Sound-Alike Phrases
• Emoji Idiom Challenge
• A–Z Category Challenge
• Fact or Fiction? Language Trivia
• Silent Sketch Communication Challenge
• Common Ground Team Challenge
• Story Chain Collaborative Writing
• Impossible Instructions Memory Challenge
• Nonsense Words Context Clues
• Word Ladder Word Puzzle
• Paper Airplane Design Challenge
• Secret Spelling Mystery Code
• Hiding Homophones Editing Challenge
• Desert Island Survival Challenge
• Emoji Cipher Decoding Challenge
• The Farmer's Dilemma Logic Puzzle
• Mystery Logic Riddle Challenge

Benefits of the Full-Year ELA Games Engagement Program: 

🏆 Builds Classroom Community: Students become part of something bigger than themselves as they collaborate, encourage one another, and work toward shared goals. The result is a classroom culture built on teamwork, belonging, and positive relationships.

🎯 Makes ELA More Engaging: Transform everyday ELA lessons into exciting team challenges that students genuinely look forward to. Instead of completing isolated assignments, every activity contributes to a larger competition that keeps motivation high all year long.

🌟 Improves Classroom Management: Reinforce the behaviours you want to see through a flexible point system that celebrates kindness, participation, responsibility, leadership, and teamwork. Classroom expectations become opportunities for students to help their team succeed.

📚 Works with Your Existing Curriculum: The ELA Games is designed to complement, not replace, your current instruction. Simply incorporate the included challenges into the units you're already teaching while maintaining complete flexibility over how and when you use them.

Whether you're looking to increase participation, strengthen classroom community, motivate reluctant learners, or simply make your ELA classroom more exciting, The ELA Games provides a complete system that students will remember long after the school year ends. Instead of isolated games, you'll create a classroom culture where every lesson contributes to something bigger, every student has opportunities to help their team succeed, and learning becomes an experience students genuinely look forward to.

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