Sentence Auction: the whiteboard game that makes grammar mistakes worth actual money
Students bid play money on sentences, some correct, some broken. Whoever holds the most correct sentences at the end wins. No printing, no invented statistics, just a game that gets louder than the material deserves.
Park English2026-08-254 min read
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You write ten sentences on the board. Seven are clean, three are wrong. Each team gets a stack of play money: torn paper, tally marks, poker chips, whatever you have lying around the staff room. They bid on sentences they think are correct. Highest bid wins that sentence. At the end you reveal which were good. The team holding the most correct sentences wins, even if they spent everything getting there.
The game works because students have to commit with limited money. They can't bid on everything. That forces discussion: is "He go to school yesterday" wrong, or does it sound wrong but we're missing something? A team that spends big on a broken sentence and wins it has bought themselves a loss, and that lands harder than a red pen mark on paper.
How to set it up
Write your sentences before class. Most hagwon periods run somewhere in the 40-to-50-minute range depending on the age group, and back-to-back classes run 40–50 minutes each with breaks at most academies, so ten sentences fits comfortably without the bidding dragging into the next class's start time. Mix obvious errors with subtle ones. At least two sentences should look wrong but be correct, because overconfidence is half of what you're teaching.
Give each team the same starting amount of made-up money. The exact number doesn't matter: 500 points, 10,000 of whatever currency you invent, a stack of ten paper "bills." What matters is that they can't buy every sentence even if they wanted to, and that splitting bids into round numbers is easy for the age group in front of you.
Run the auction one sentence at a time. Read it aloud, give them thirty seconds to confer, then take bids. If no one bids, the sentence goes unsold, which happens when everyone privately suspects it's wrong. That's fine. Write the winning team's name next to the sentence and move on.
Team size matters more than people think. Hagwon classes tend to run small, typically 8 to 12 students, and some report class sizes usually under 12 students. At that size, two or three teams of three or four is about right. Any more teams than that and the bidding rounds take too long; any fewer and there's no real competition for the sentences.
What to put on the board
| Level | Correct sentence | Trap sentence |
|---|---|---|
| Low intermediate | She doesn't like pizza. | He don't like pizza. |
| Mid intermediate | I've lived here for three years. | I'm living here for three years. |
| High intermediate | If I were rich, I'd travel more. | If I was rich, I'd travel more. (both defensible, good fight) |
The best sentences are the ones where half the class is sure it's right and half is sure it's broken. "I've been to Seoul" versus "I've gone to Seoul" will split a room because the textbook drilled one and their YouTubers say the other. Let them argue it out before you settle it.
Throw in one sentence that looks wrong but follows a rule from two units ago. "Never have I seen such a mess" will get argued over because of the inversion, but it's correct, and someone will remember why. When a team wins that one for almost nothing because no one else bid on it, they've made a smart trade and they know it.
Three ways it goes sideways
- A team runs out of money halfway through. That's the game. If they blew most of it on the first three sentences, they sit out the rest and learn to budget next time. Don't top them up.
- A team bids everything on one sentence. Let them. If it's correct, they win big. If it's wrong, the room remembers that longer than a worksheet.
- You wrote a sentence wrong by accident. It happens. If the room calls you on it, admit it and pull the sentence. Don't defend it. They trust the next round more when you own the mistake.
Scaling it
For elementary classes, use six sentences instead of ten and stick to present simple errors and missing articles. For older or higher-level classes, write twelve and include one genuinely controversial one: split infinitives, singular they, starting a sentence with and. Let the argument run a few minutes, then explain that usage has shifted on some of these and move on.
We honestly don't know the ideal ratio of correct to broken sentences. We've had good rounds at 70/30 and at 50/50, and it seems to depend more on the group's confidence than on any fixed rule. Try both and see which one gets more disagreement in your room.