Every lesson in the curriculum now has a section called Play and practice. It holds one short reading and three games: crosswords, word searches, matching, memory cards, sorting, and unscrambles. Together there are more than three hundred of them across the six levels.
That might sound like decoration. It is not. Each game was chosen because it makes you do a specific kind of thinking that the rest of the lesson does not ask for, or does not ask for often enough. This note explains what the games are for, why they sit where they do, and how to use them, whether you are in a live lesson or practicing alone.
Understanding is not the same as remembering
Most learners know this feeling. In the lesson, the rule makes sense. You follow the examples, you get the drill right, and you leave thinking, “I’ve got it.” Two days later, in a real conversation, the right form does not come.
The problem is not that you did not understand. It is that understanding and recall are different skills. Understanding happens when you see a pattern. Recall happens when you can pull the pattern out of memory, quickly, without the example in front of you.
Recall gets stronger every time you practice it, and it gets stronger faster when the practice takes a little effort. Reading the rule again feels productive, but it mostly practices recognition. Trying to produce bought from buy with no list to look at practices recall. That small struggle is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the part that makes the memory stick.
Games are a low-pressure way to get many of those small struggles in a short time.
Seven games, seven different jobs
Each activity in the Play and practice section targets a different decision. They are not interchangeable.
The reading puts the lesson’s language back into a real context: a message, a notice, a short story. You read once for meaning and answer three questions. Then you read again and tap every example of the grammar you just studied. That second pass trains you to notice the pattern in the wild, which is how you will meet it outside class.
Crosswords ask you to produce a word from a clue, letter by letter. The clues are usually a sentence with a gap and a hint, such as “Yesterday I ___ to the bank. (go)”. You cannot recognize the answer from a list. You have to recall it and spell it.
Word searches use the same idea with less pressure. When the list shows only a cue, like “buy → ?”, you must think of bought before you can find it.
Matching builds links between two things that belong together: a verb and its past form, a question and its answer, a full clause and its shorter version. Every wrong match gives instant feedback, so you learn the pairs quickly.
Memory cards practice the same links with one extra challenge: you have to remember where each card was. It is the most game-like activity, and it works well as a warm-up.
Sorting asks you to apply the lesson’s rule to new examples. Is stopped pronounced with /t/, /d/, or /ɪd/? Is this sentence a concession or a contrast? Each item is a small decision, and the check shows which decisions you got right.
Unscrambles rebuild word order, one of the hardest things to fix by explanation alone. Putting did, you, where, go in the right order a few times does more for questions than reading about auxiliaries.
You can see all of these together in the A2 past simple lesson, which was the first lesson to get the full set.
Why the games come before speaking
The Play and practice section always sits after the controlled practice and before the lesson’s speaking or writing task. That placement is deliberate.
A good lesson moves from understanding to accuracy to real use. The early drills build accuracy with a lot of support. The games then remove some of that support and add variety, so the pattern starts to feel automatic. Only after that does the lesson ask you to talk about your own week, plan a trip, or argue a point.
If the games came after speaking, they would feel like an afterthought. If they replaced speaking, the lesson would end with recognition instead of real communication. Every lesson in the curriculum still ends with you speaking or writing. The games are there to make that last step easier.
How to use them in a live lesson
In a one-to-one lesson on video, the games are flexible tools, not a fixed part of every session. Here are three ways a tutor might use them:
- As a warm-up. Open the memory game or the matching game from the previous lesson. Two or three minutes of retrieval at the start is a fast way to find out what stuck.
- As a fast finisher. If the main practice goes faster than expected, the crossword gives five to ten minutes of focused recall without a new explanation.
- As a diagnostic. The sorting game shows quickly whether a rule is secure. If the learner sorts eleven of twelve correctly, move on. If the boxes are mixed up, go back to the explanation.
In Teach mode, each game is its own step. The toolbar’s Check, Reveal, and Reset buttons work on whichever game is on screen, so the tutor can control the activity while the learner does the thinking.
How to use them as homework
The games also work when you practice alone. Every activity checks itself, shows which answers are right and wrong, and lets you start again.
A simple homework routine takes about fifteen minutes:
- Do the reading first. Read for meaning, answer the three questions, then do the find-the-grammar hunt.
- Do one game you find hard. If spelling is your weak point, choose the crossword. If word order is, choose the unscramble.
- Wait a day, then do another. Spacing practice across days helps memory more than doing everything at once.
- Say your answers aloud. When you finish an unscramble, read each sentence out loud. The game checks the order; your voice practices the rhythm.
If you want more reading than the lesson provides, the Reading Lab has longer texts at every level, each with vocabulary help, comprehension questions, and a speaking task.
Getting the most from each attempt
A few habits make the games much more useful:
- Try before you check. The value is in the attempt. Pressing Show answers too early skips the part that builds memory.
- Read the feedback, not just the score. When an answer is marked wrong, the reason is usually in the item itself: the time phrase, the subject, the clue in brackets.
- Repeat the ones you missed. Press Start again and do the game a second time a few hours later. The second attempt is usually faster, and that speed is the goal.
- Keep it short. Ten focused minutes beats forty distracted ones.
What the games cannot do
The games are good at one thing: making useful language easier to remember and faster to retrieve. They are not a replacement for conversation, and they do not measure everything that matters.
A learner can finish every crossword in a lesson and still hesitate in a real conversation. That is normal. Speaking under real-time pressure is a separate skill, and it needs real practice with a real person. The games prepare the ground; the speaking task, and the live lesson, are where that preparation turns into ability.
The games also do not track you. Nothing is saved between visits, and there are no points or streaks to maintain. This is intentional. The goal is not to collect a score. It is to leave each lesson able to say something you could not say before.
A small change with a big purpose
Adding games to every lesson was not about making the site look more fun, although we hope it is. It was about adding more of the kind of practice that actually changes what you can do: short, effortful, varied recall, with clear feedback.
Open any lesson in the curriculum, scroll to Play and practice, and try one game you have not played before. Then notice whether the language comes a little more easily the next time you need it.