Order up!

Another game "borrowed" from peer support and a dozen other places.

I wrote numbers on sticky labels and stuck one on each student's back without them seeing. They then had to get into order from smallest to largest without using any English.

I have also done this by giving each student their number so they can see, but not anyone else - this way, I could avoid having one clever child simply moving everyone else into the right spot.

To make things harder, the numbers were non-sequential (with a couple of sequential numbers thrown in), and included some huge numbers that I knew they couldn't say just yet in the target language because I wanted to talk about problem solving when it comes to language.
very successful, got the kids out of the seat and talking to each other and there were some interesting solutions to communicating the large numbers - and yes, they did only use Indonesian :)

The more common context for the game is to get everyone in age order (or birthday order) without speaking at all. You could do the same thing for other sorting activities - eg, alphabetical order, or to get them into groups (eg types of animals - mammals, reptiles etc)

Any other ideas?