Difficulty: Easy
Playingcomputer games online is a popular pastime for many students, but it can be a way to studyEnglish too. A few websites offer free and fun English as a Second Language (ESL) games, fromcrossword puzzles and word jumbles to adventure games that can help
encourage Englishconversation.

Interesting Things for ESL Students
Inter esting Things for ESL Students is a large collection of not only Englishexercisesand quizzes, but wordgames, puzzles, and more fun games for ESL students. The website offers hundreds of crosswordpuzzles to play online,some with images, and many that include the words on the Voice of America's(VOA) Special English Word List. The puzzles come in various sizes, but all require Java to play. Other games on the website include Crazy Sentence Singer, Slider Puzzle, and Joggle. The site also hasaudio-assisted activities to teach students jokes, limericks, tongue twisters, and poems.www.manythings.org/

Merriam-Webster Online Word Games
The website for the Merriam-Webster dictionary offers hundreds of word games for all levels of Englishlanguage learners. In addition to the Universal Crossword, LATimes Crossword, and JumbleCrosswords, the website has an online version of Scrabble, a great game for students to work on their spelling and vocabulary skills. Other word games include Word Vault, which has students combineletters to make words on a bank vault to simulate opening the vault in less than a minute, to Play4,which asks students to type four letter words based on provided clues in a specific amount of time.Word versions of Solitaire and Sudoku are also available. www.merriam-webster.com

Word Vine
Students can choose from basic, easy, medium, and hard levels in Word Vine. This game focuses oncompound words, and makes a difficult concept fun. Depending on the skill level you choose, an emptyvine and several leaves with words are provided. Drag and drop the leaves on the vine so that oneword is the root word, and the others are all connected. For example, with the words "house," "tree,""apple," and "trunk," the word "tree" goes to the center of the vine, and the other words go to the stemssprouting off of it because they all form compound word with "tree." www.miniclip.com