Preposition games for ESL: start with the body, finish with the sentence

Most lists of preposition games are built for a room full of children: Simon Says, hide the toy, a classroom "ghost" who moves things around. They work. They also assume a classroom, and a learner young enough to enjoy standing behind a chair on command.

If you teach adults, or teach one learner through a webcam, you need the same ideas in a different shape. And you need to notice something those lists skip: a preposition of place, a preposition of time and a dependent preposition are three different teaching problems. An activity that fixes one does little for the others.

Which preposition game fits which kind of preposition

Pick the activity by what makes the preposition hard: objects and gesture for place and movement, sorting for time, repeated retrieval for dependent prepositions. English has a lot of them (the British Council puts the number at about 60 to 70 different prepositions), so sorting by kind is what makes the choice manageable.

Kind	Examples	What makes it hard	What fits	Typical level
Place	in, on, under, next to, between, behind, opposite	The learner's first language may draw the lines in different places, such as one word where English has both in and on	Objects on camera, gesture, Labelled Diagram	A1 to A2
Movement	into, out of, through, across, along, past	It describes a path, not a point	Tracing the path with a hand, giving and following directions	A2 to B1
Time	at 7, on Monday, in July, for, since, by, until	It follows a system that feels arbitrary until someone shows it	Sorting, Complete the Sentence, personal questions	A2 to B1
Dependent	interested in, depend on, good at, afraid of, apply for	There is no rule to rediscover; it has to be remembered	Match Pairs, Complete the Sentence, Type the Answer	B1 to B2

Read down the "What fits" column and the pattern is plain. The more spatial the meaning, the more the body helps. The more arbitrary the pairing, the more the learner needs repeated retrieval.

How to teach place and movement: the body first

A preposition of place is a picture of space, so let the learner build the picture with their hands before they see it written.

The desk scene. Put a mug and a pen in front of your camera. Move the pen: on the mug, in the mug, behind it, next to it. The learner says where it is. Then swap roles: the learner tells you where to put it and you follow the instruction exactly, mistakes included. A pen that ends up in the mug when they meant on tends to teach more than a correction would.

The desk ghost. This is the British Council's classroom ghost, shrunk to fit a webcam. The learner looks away for ten seconds while you move three objects on your desk. They describe what changed: "The phone was next to the lamp. Now it's under the notebook."

Hands in frame. Agree one hand shape per preposition with the learner: a flat palm over a fist for above, a fist pushed through a ring of fingers for through. Say a sentence, they show the shape. Then reverse it: you show the shape, they say the sentence.

Route to work. For movement prepositions, have the learner describe their route to work or to the shops while tracing it in the air: out of the building, across the road, along the river, past the station. Paths need a moving hand, not a pointing one.

Label the room. A Labelled Diagram activity built on a photo of a room gives a quick written check once the spoken work is done.

There is evidence that the gesture step is part of the learning itself.

A look from embodied cognition

In Susan Goldin-Meadow's lab, children told to gesture while learning a new maths concept kept what they had learned better than children told only to say it, and in Manuela Macedonia and Thomas Knösche's study, adults' gestured words in an artificial language were remembered better and used more often in new sentences. Neither study tested prepositions, but a preposition of place is about as spatial as a word gets. When your learner pushes a fist through their fingers and says through, the gesture gives the word a second way back into memory.

Cook, Mitchell & Goldin-Meadow (2008); Macedonia & Knösche (2011).

How to teach prepositions of time: show the system, then sort

At, on and in for time look random until you show the shape: at for a point (at 7, at night), on for a day (on Monday, on my birthday), in for anything longer (in July, in 2020, in the morning). Draw it as a funnel from small to large and, in practice, most adult learners relax, because now there is something to reason with.

Then practise the reasoning, not the list:

• Sort first. Give twelve time expressions and three columns. Sorting makes the learner apply the rule to each item.
• Personal questions. "When's your next day off? When did you start your job? When do you usually call your family?" The answers force the learner to choose a preposition about their own life, which is the version they will need outside the lesson.
• The awkward ones last. For versus since, and by versus until, deserve their own short round once at, on, in is steady. Mixing them in on day one turns one clear system into a fog.

How to teach dependent prepositions: retrieval over rules

Interested in, depend on, responsible for, good at. No funnel explains why it is on and not of. The learner has to retrieve each pairing enough times that it comes out right under pressure, which is why we treat these as a B1 to B2 problem: learners at that level talk fast enough to reach for them.

Three habits help:

1. Group by preposition, not alphabetically. Interested in, involved in, specialise in sit together; so do depend on, rely on, insist on. Groups give the memory something to hang on.
2. Practise the chunk, not the preposition. Drill I'm interested in, not in. A learner who has said the whole phrase ten times tends to reach for the phrase.
3. Climb from recognition to production. Match Pairs (verb to preposition) first, then Complete the Sentence with the preposition removed, then Type the Answer with nothing to choose from. Each step asks a little more of memory. If you want the reasoning behind that order, this guide to choosing a format by goal walks through it.

Here is the middle of that climb. It is a Complete the Sentence activity from our public library; picture it filled with the ten verb-and-preposition pairs your learner keeps getting wrong.

Play a Complete the Sentence activity: prepositions of place

You can build one from your own list in a minute: type the sentences with the preposition as the blank, or describe the set you want and let AI draft it for you to edit. Students play from a link or a code, with no account, and you see who got which item wrong. The same items switch to Match Pairs or Type the Answer without retyping, so one list covers the whole climb.

The rest of our prepositions sets, for place, time and movement, are on the A2 English games page, next to irregular past tense and travel English.

How to run a 20-minute preposition sequence online

Run the desk scene, the gesture work and one Complete the Sentence activity back to back, and a single 20-minute block moves from the body to the written sentence.

Minutes	Step	What the learner does
0 to 3	Desk scene	Says where the object is as you move it
3 to 7	Role swap	Gives you instructions; you follow them exactly
7 to 10	Hands in frame	Shows the gesture for your sentence, then says the sentence for your gesture
10 to 15	Complete the Sentence	Fills the gaps on their own screen while you watch the results
15 to 20	Describe your room	Talks for a minute without stopping while you note errors
Homework	Type the Answer	Same items, nothing to choose from

In practice, adults rarely object to moving their hands once they see why. What they object to is being treated as children, which is why the activities above use their desk, their route and their week rather than a cartoon bedroom. If you want more on that line, here is what makes a game land with adult learners. And if your learners struggle to hold on to the chunks between lessons, these review formats are built for exactly that.

Sources & further reading

• Five fun activities to teach prepositions. British Council, Voices. The classroom ghost, grand design and timetable dictation, with the note on how many prepositions English has.
• Gesturing makes learning last (Cook, Mitchell & Goldin-Meadow, 2008). Cognition. Children asked to gesture while learning kept the new concept better than children asked only to speak.
• Body in mind: how gestures empower foreign language learning (Macedonia & Knösche, 2011). Mind, Brain, and Education. Adults remembered gestured foreign words better and used them more in new sentences.