The Best Free Online Action Verb Games

Action Verbs are great fun to teach to all ages of English learners, especially younger learners. Although there are hundreds of way to teach them to both native and second language students. One of these ways is by using online action verb games.

These can be useful both in the classroom and the home and are great to add an element of interactivity into your lessons. We teach these in Kindergarten and Grade 1 in both native and ESL / Second language classrooms all over the world.

One of the most effective ways of teaching action verbs if unable to use physical activities is to use some practice and consolidation online action verb games. All of these are free to play and they are suitable for both younger and older students.

Using multi pronged teaching methods helps to motivate and engage multiple learning styles. We have a selection of hard resources to print through this article as well. From physical games to worksheets and tasks. you can find these where ever you see a link.

If you are looking for Worksheets or activities for adjectives or anything English related we have hundreds for free and in the shop n the site. Just follow the links for details.

We also have articles and guides on the best games for other English and Phonics subjects as well. These include:

• Best FREE Online CVC Games
• Best FREE Online Digraph Games
• Best FREE Online Short Vowels Games
• Best FREE Online Long Vowels Games
• Best FREE Online Rhyming Games
• Best FREE Online Sentence Games
• Best FREE Online Syllable Games
• Best FREE Online Prepositions Games
• Best Free Online Adjective Games

Online Action Verb Games Games

The following online Action Verb games are reviewed and linked to below. To access them you can click the title, the picture or the button to take you to the game and the hosting site! Hope they are useful and happy teaching!

All of these have been tested by teachers and are working. None are Flash (or if they are are, they are still working!)

• Kid Heroes Verbs – Room Recess
• Action Verb Match – ESL Games Plus
• Monkey Action Verbs – ESL Games Plus
• Picture the Verb – Turtle Diary
• Space Verbs – ESL Games Plus
• Action Verb Board Game – Freddiesville
• Action Verbs Sound Match – British Council
• Balloon Verbs – Soft schools
• Ice Cream Action Verbs – ABCya

Kid Heroes Verbs – Room Recess.

This game is awesome. It is a proper students friendly game, with an outcome and engaging gameplay. Credit to Room Recess for another great game. It is not solely a Verbs game and actually has options for nouns, verbs or a combination of the two.

Although not strictly an action verb game, most of the the verbs are Action words. This games focus is on tenses and use of irregular verbs. Although this may be tricky for absolute beginners or lower level ESL for all others it should be a great teaching and practice resource.

It is quite addictive and i got to round 22 before I died, so if you have some students who are really good at English see if they can beat that! However it took me a couple of goes till I realized you can upgrade your characters between each round as well

The game play has more to it than normal point and press game for classrooms so i will explain a little here.

• Students have to find the correct word tense to complete the sentence
• If they do so they can choose from three characters to fight the incoming monster. These are an Archer, Warrior and a healer.
• They drag and drop the character onto the line and answer another question, it is actually trickier than it sounds but there is enough time to answer maybe 8 or so questions
• So how they place and how they choose their characters does actually matter
• Should they defeat the monster then they can progress to the next level

Features:

• Great gameplay, definitely will have students askign to play again
• Uses Tenses for verbs so can be used for more than just verb recognition
• Has verb use in context, not just single words
• Multi levelled so can be used for longer than a 5 minute quick consolidation.

Action Verb Match – ESL Games Plus

A simple picture matching game from ESL games Plus, who have three on this list. It is just pictures and no sound so is a reading and matching task for students that needs them to remember where pictures are.

Thee type of games are a basic extension of a PowerPoint game, but if you have whiteboards or other interactive media then you can use this as a front of class activity and get the whole class involved.

The words on this list are all action verbs, so it can be paired with other activities or work, like the activities and task we have in our articles and on our worksheets. (links included)

Features

• Simple and easy to use
• Suitable to use as a whole class activity
• Replayable and could use as end of lesson activity to clam class down.
• Lots of other games on this site

Monkey Action Verbs – ESL Games Plus

This sentence construction and Action Verb game, again from ESL Games Plus uses both nouns and verbs to encourage the student to make complete sentences.

It is a little more complex that the ESL Plus game above so would be suited for levels above beginner. However with scafollding and support could also be used to introduce simple sentence structure.

It is good to see games that show the verb is use rather than just recognition of the word ”as a verb” although there are some of those on the lists as well.

Features:

• Uses Verbs in context, which is a nice touch
• Mainly Action Verbs in the game
• No Spoken words so is a reading exercise solely
• Simple enough for whole class teaching

Picture the Verb – Turtle Diary

Turtle Diary used to have a huge amount of games but it is having some trouble with the compatibility of flash and browsers. These are the list of all their verb games, but they are only a couple that work. One of which is this game we highlight here.

It is super simple, including the platform game next to it. All students have to do is choose the correct sentence that describes the picture. That’s it, if they are correct the small character then walks and climbs up the levels to the end.

With this pretty limited gameplay it is realistically suitable for only very low levels and maybe kindergarten children. If you need an introduction to verbs then this will work for a quick interactive action verb game.

Features:

• Very short and simple game
• Suitable for introduction to verbs
• Good site but Flash games need updating
• Aimed at K123 Levels of English.

Note about Turtle Diary.

It is worth bookmarking this site. They have (had) loads of really good games hosted there. However the January 2021 Adobe Flash issue has made a lot unplayable. They are working through them but understandably it will take some time. The two i have linked to above both work and are examples of what they can do when they get round to update their games.

Hopefully, for teachers everywhere, they can do this fairly quickly. You can see there were over 15 adjective games just on this one site!, so its worth checking back to see how they are getting on.

Space Verbs – ESL Games Plus

One of the newer style games from ESL Games Plus. It is another picture to word matching exercise but this includes spoken versions as well so it can be used for listening practice as well as reading.

THe aim is to collect all the bones in space ( why not) and help the Sapcedog. Students do this by answering the questions and choosing the correct action verb.

Although the game play is fairly straightforward the visuals of this online action verb game are pretty good and will keep children entertained during the lesson. This is the third online verb game from ESL games Plus.

• Very well made Graphics. Looks the part
• Uses verbs in sentences to add context
• Long enough to be useful and short enough to be a good part of a lesson
• Can be used as a full lesson resource and plenty of opportunity for follow up activities

Action Verb Board Game – Freddiesville

This actually looks like a ESL games resource but is hosted on another website. This online action verb game is a roll the dice board game style. Students roll the dice and have to answer the question / fill in the missing word to progress.

Although billed as an Action Verb game it actually seems to be more of a vocabulary recognition game for some of the play through. However, teachers could use the sentence structures to spot the verb, or to ask the students to spot the difference between the verbs and nouns.

Features:

• A video game hosted on YouTube
• Good for encouraging writing as well as verbal answers
• Can play as a whole class and even make it the main part of a lesson.
• Only really good to use one time

Action Verbs Sound Match – British Council

Although this online action verb game is another match the word with the picture game. It is from the british council, so it comes with a little extra teachign sauce.

THis one has the option of beingboth a listening exercise or a reading exercise. On each of the matching words there is a speaker whcih when pressed will read the word out for students.

We much prefer this extra level of detail in the games as it offers more flexibility and more use for teachers to get the most out of the resources on offer.

Other than than this is a typical matching game for students.

• Simple and effective
• Has spoken and reading options
• Quite quick to play through
• Good for a quick check of understanding

Balloon Verbs – Soft schools

As promised here is a spot the verb online game. This is from Soft Schools. It asks students to pop as many balloons as they can that have verbs ( in various tense forms)

That’s all there is to it really It keeps a running score of those correct, incorrect and any missed verbs. As a consolidation exercise this will be quite useful, but it would be better suited to classrooms rather than a send home game for lockdowns or similar.

• Super quick and super simple
• Better suited for Classrooms than homes
• not much replay value
• Easy for younger learners to grasp

Ice Cream Action Verbs – ABCya

THis is a nice little game to finish on. ABC ya have a paywall surround some of their content so its ncie to find this high quality free action verbs online game on there.

Students ahve to spot the verb in the sentence and click on it. If they are correct then their monkey gets the scoop of acecream. If they are incorrect then the monster gets it. The aim is to get to 10 scoops beore the monster!

it is a nice and simple, nice and effective and a nice and free online action verbs game. .

Students must read the sentence and then tick the word that is an adjective. Nothing more to it than that. It works, its easy to teach and its free. Not a lot more we can ask for!

Features:

• Simple and quick game
• Asks students to identify the verbs in the sentence
• From a great English online games provider.
• Well made and can serve as both a long or short activity.

Final Thoughts.

Action verbs (and of course verbs) are a mainstay of all languages. So fairly obviously they are introduced very early on with songs, action games and formal lessons. All of which we have on the site. However technology marches forward and some (certainly not all) of these games and tasks translate pretty well onto the computer.

Students automatically prick up their ears when teachers start using technology in the classroom. So using Free Online Action Verb games as part of your teacher toolkit should always attract attention and encourage encouragement.

Although they will never replace physical activities for the teaching of action verbs (which in our opinion is the best way to introduce verbs at least in present tense to both older and younger learners) However they will appeal to students and can be used to solidify what other teaching methods have introduced.

Hopefully the nine or so we have introduced above will help you in your classrooms or teaching environments. We also have other top lists of other English Topics and Phonics above if you need them. Just click here to go back to the top of the page and find them.

The more diverse and alternative approaches you can take with education, especially in todays technological world, the more chances you have for both maintaining students interest and for making sure the information sticks!

Online games are certainly one way to help achieve that aim