AGO

01/07/2024

Elementary aged students learning once a week at an eikaiwa can become "fluent" at AGO Q&A Aqua by the end of their first year of study! This is a good benchmark and a challenge your students will likely enjoy taking part in, and the positive start and momentum open up many future possibilities! Check our blog post for a printable guide and more information about how you can achieve this in your classroom!

Elementary aged students learning English once a week in an eikaiwa setting can become "fluent" at asking and answering all of the questions in AGO Q&A Aqua by the end of their first year of study! This is a good benchmark and a challenge students enjoy taking part in! "Fluent" means that students h...

15/06/2024

New Zealand newspaper Business Desk kindly did this write up on AGO, and how we came about! You can read it here:

In 2010, when Leon Butchers took the leap and tied his future to the performance of his educational card game business, he set himself a target of 2000 sales by...

27/02/2024

AGO QnA games are all about learning new vocabulary and grammar structures conversationally and while having fun - through asking and answering questions with other players that practice specific language targets. Ideally game dialogues go further than just a simple question and response, with players expanding the dialogue - the more practice the better! Besides the questions on the cards, various game situations also allow further opportunities to practice English in context and engage in some banter!

In reality due to understanding gaps it can be difficult for players to expand and freestyle. To help make this a little easier, we made a printable cheat sheet of useful in game phrases, which you can leave on the table as you play, or give to students. Ideally over time, they will become familiar with more and more of these phrases. It makes playing a little more fun!

You can download this printable from our website blog here:

https://agocards.com/2024/02/28/useful-game-phrases-printable-encouraging-students-to-ask-follow-up-questions-and-expand-conversations-in-ago-qna-games/

20/01/2024

There's a new addition to the AGO QnA series! Introducing AGO QnA Yellow (level 2.5). Printed on big cards and packaged in a 2 piece box. You can get a sneak preview next weekend at the in Osaka or Tokyo the week after. 🌊🍀🍊

14/08/2023

Here's a fun and easy way to use AGO Link cards, that we only just figured out. As it's so simple, maybe some people already play this way already!

Here's how to play:
Put aside the Pick up cards, then spread all remaining 50 cards face up on a table.
Nominate a starting player. They choose any card, pick it up, and call out a word from that card.
E.g. in the example below the player called out the word bed.
As BED ends with a D, players race to find and touch the D card. The first person to do so wins the round.
The winner then calls out a word from the card they just won.

That is pretty much it! But here's a few extra details:
-After calling out a word, the player places the card they had picked up into their score pile (the player that collects the most cards by the end, wins).

-There will sometimes be two cards with the same letter to touch. In that case, the fastest to touch a correct card wins the round.

-If a player calls out a word which doesn't have a matching card (usually later in the game), players can match a star(*) card with the same color (nb J, V and Q). If there is still no match on the table, the player should choose a different word.

That's pretty much all there is to it. Simple, fun and easy! Hope you have fun with this one!

04/11/2022

Introducing AGO Phonics Black and the Advanced Phonics levels box set!
Want a chance to be among the first to try these games out?
Well, we have a few samples to give away - one each of AGO Phonics Zero, AGO Phonics Advanced set and AGO Phonics Black...

Like this post to enter! You'll also get extra chances if you tag comment or share. We will pick 3 winners at random.
Best of luck!

https://agocards.com/ago-phonics-advanced-levels/

P.S. these products aren't officially in stock yet*, so winners will be among the first to try the new games out!

🤫*there is a small amount of stock available to Japanese customers at englishbooks.jp! We'll put a link in the comments.

24/10/2022

Happy Halloween season, everyone!

If you're looking for some extra Halloween ideas or materials for your home or classroom, here's a link to some free and fun printable games and activities from our website - including a printable version of the AGO Halloween game board extension for AGO Halloween cards.

https://agocards.com/2021/10/29/ago-halloween-materials/

And for those who have played the board game a lot, try this variation to spook the game up: Allow players to also place chips on characters that pop up in other squares (some examples are highlighted in purple below). E.g. you can now play a 'black cat' card in the bottom left square, as there is a cat lying down there. Give it a try!

21/10/2022

Check out our upcoming game release: AGO Phonics Zero!

💧☘️🍊

Made for younger students, beginners and emergent readers. The target vocab practices CVC words (i.e. 3 letter words).

Zero has 2 playing decks. The 2nd deck has game vocabulary in random order without pictures, for reading and decoding practice.

You can find out a lot more about how it all works at:

agocards.com/zero.

p.s. The game will be available from early November 2022

💧☘️🍊

08/08/2022

Danke Herr Antrim for making this video!

In this video I introduce you to a card game for German learners. It is like Uno had a baby with a Beginner German phrase book. Check it out and let me know ...

08/07/2022

We've been laying a bit low of late, but that doesn't mean we haven't been working hard at creating new AGO games! Bet you've never seen any of these before!!!

03/04/2022

A student once asked if it was an error that the word "had" was used twice in a row in a sentence. After briefly explaining that that (another double) can be grammatically fine, I did a little research on this interesting word, figuring perhaps you can go even further, and found this great article. Well, besides 3 times in a row (e.g. the opinion he had had had no effect), or 4 times in a row (the opinion he had had had had no effect), it turns out it is even possible to construct a grammatically correct (though most confusing) sentence using the word had ELEVEN times in a row!!!
Here is the link:

The word had can easily appear twice consecutively in a sentence, for example "The opinion he had had didn't matter". Three times is quite possible "The opinion he had had had no effect", and even four times "The opinion he had had had had no effect", but I recently cam

06/12/2021

Check out these free Christmas printable activities we've just put online! These activity sheets help to reinforce the content practiced in AGO Christmas card game in a fun way, and we've added some new stuff for this Christmas season, too!

https://agocards.com/2021/12/06/ago-christmas-card-game-free-worksheets/