I have one class of teens who beg to play Las Vegas Grammar every lesson – they know that it’s a grammar game, they know that when we play we’re practising a specific grammar point that we’ve looked at recently, they know they’re working and that it’s not really a game, and yet they still love it!

Las Vegas Grammar came about because I could never figure out how to play Grammar Auction. The principles are basically the same, I think – as I say, I never worked out Grammar Auction, so I can’t really be sure…

Divide the class into teams and give each team ten points. Write a series of sentences on the board. In this example, let’s imagine we’re working with intermediate students and looking at the difference between present simple and present continuous.

Ask each team to look at the first sentence and decide if they think it is grammatically correct. If they think a sentence is incorrect, ask them to write the corrected version into a notebook. They then have to bet a number of points based on whether they think they’ll get it right or not. In order to win the points they must also correct the sentence properly if they believe it is incorrect.

Team A says the first sentence is correct and bets 3 points.
Team B says the sentence is incorrect, bets 5 points and writes the following correction in a notebook, “We play football every Saturday afternoon.”
Team C says the sentence is incorrect, bets 5 points and writes the following correction in a notebook, “We are play football every Saturday afternoon.”

At the end of the first round, Team A has 7 points, Team B has 15 and Team C has 5. And so you move on to the second sentence.

Obviously the minimum bet would be 1 point and you can choose whether you have a maximum bet (5 points, 10 points, half your current score).

Have fun playing!