The Biggest and the Best Comparative and Superlative Activities

Here are games and activities for practising comparatives and superlatives.

Comparative pairs

Put students into pairs and task them with finding out enough information to make five comparisons between them.

For example:

Sheila is taller than me

My bag is bigger than Sheila’s bag

Superlative group

Put students into groups of three. Ask them to come up with five sets of sentences in the form of:

Jean is taller than Stephan, but Ulrike is the tallest.

Tiago has more cats than Thibeau, but Dapo has the most cats

Dice comparisons

Decide on a category of objects which contains suitably varied items such as cars, animals, cities.

Brainstorm and write on the board examples of adjectives which can be used to describe items from a chosen category. In this example we will use the category Cities. Giving specific examples such as London, Istanbul, Florence, Hong Kong will help to elicit suitable target adjectives such as hot, cold, crowded, polluted, clean, dirty, cheap, expensive, touristy, rainy, beautiful, etc.

Choose six well known examples of the category that have significant differences from each other. And write them on the board next to the numbers 1 – 6.

New York
Dubai
Venice
Tokyo
Dublin
Beunos Aries

Now give pairs or small groups a dice. They should roll the dice twice and make comparisons of the two cities which they have rolled. They should attempt to compare the items in the order which they were rolled and not switch the order to make an easier comparison.

For example:

I think New York is more expensive than Venice

The buildings in Dubai are taller than the buildings in Dublin

To practise superlatives you can now have groups decide on some superlative statements using the adjectives from the board.

For example:

Venice is the most beautiful city on the list

I think Tokyo is the most interesting city

Make sentences using common adjectives

Give pairs of small groups of students a set of shuffled common adjective cards. As a preliminary exercise you could have them try to find as many pairs of opposites as they can.

Students should now place a pack of the shuffled cards face down on the table and take it in turns to turn over the top card. They should now attempt to make a comparative sentence using the correct selected adjective.