Emoji Story
Read a line of emojis and guess the English phrase, idiom or film title behind it — then reveal it and talk about what it means.
Save a set · free
Want your own questions on the emoji story? Type them once, save the set, play it any time on any device.
Playing this with a student?
In a lesson, open it from Resources and share your screen — and save your own set first so the game runs on your student's words, not a stock list.
Start freeHow to play
Read the emojis out loud
Each puzzle is a short line of emojis standing in for an English phrase. Have the student narrate what they literally see first — "a bee, then a leaf" — before they try to solve it. Naming the pictures in English is half the value of the round.
Guess the phrase
Say the phrase you think the line spells out. Wrong guesses are worth having out loud: the near-misses are usually other real English expressions, which is a vocabulary lesson you did not have to prepare.
Reveal it, then talk about it
Show the answer and do not move straight to the next puzzle. Ask what the phrase means, when you would actually say it, and whether their own language has anything like it. The reveal is where the round starts, not where it ends.
Emoji Story as a teaching tool
The guessing is the warm-up; the idiom is the lesson
It is tempting to treat this as a quick quiz — puzzle, answer, next. The version that teaches something spends two minutes on every reveal. An idiom is only useful to a learner who knows its register and its typical situation, and neither of those is visible in the words. "Break the ice" and "break a leg" look equally idiomatic on the page; one you can say to a client, one you say to an actor. Ask when they would use it, who to, and what a slightly wrong use would sound like. That is the part that transfers into speech.
Literal description is free language practice
Before anyone solves the puzzle, get the student to describe what is on screen in plain English: the objects, their order, what is happening between them. You are getting nouns, prepositions and sequencing language out of a student who thinks they are just playing. With lower levels this is often the whole activity and the phrase itself is a bonus — an A2 learner naming six pictures in sequence is producing more English than the same learner answering four comprehension questions.
Mine the wrong answers
The wrong guesses in this game are unusually productive because they are rarely nonsense. A student who reads the same line as "a piece of cake" when the answer was "easy as pie" has just produced a genuine synonym, and the pair is worth writing down together. Keep a running list of everything the class offered before the reveal; by the end of the round you have a small semantic field the students generated themselves, which is retained far better than a list you handed out.
Flip it: let the student build the puzzle
The strongest version of this activity is the one where the student makes the emoji line for a phrase you have recently taught, and you have to guess it. Encoding a phrase forces them to think about its literal components and its figurative meaning at the same time, which is precisely the double awareness idioms need. It is also excellent homework: three home-made puzzles for the phrases from last week's lesson, and you sit in the guessing seat next time.
Frequently asked questions
What levels does Emoji Story work for?
Roughly A2 to C1, but for different reasons at each end. At A2 the value is in describing what is on screen and meeting a handful of very common expressions. At B2 and C1 it is a genuine idiom workout, and the discussion after each reveal — register, situation, equivalents in the student's own language — carries the weight.
How do I use it in an English lesson?
Share your screen, get the emojis described literally, take guesses out loud, then reveal and spend two minutes on what the phrase actually means and when you would say it. Six puzzles treated that way is a solid fifteen-minute segment; six puzzles treated as a quiz is two minutes of nothing.
Isn't guessing from pictures a bit childish for adults?
Adults tend to enjoy it more than teenagers do, in our experience, because the puzzle is genuinely a puzzle and the payoff is an expression they did not know. The framing matters: present it as an idioms activity with a visual prompt, not as a game, and bring the discussion after each reveal up to their level.
Can I write my own emoji puzzles?
Yes. Sign up free and save your own set — your phrases, your emoji lines. Building puzzles for the idioms you actually taught is what turns this from a general knowledge quiz into revision, and it is also excellent homework when you hand the job to the student.
Does it work with groups?
Very well. Put the line on a shared screen and take guesses from teams, but award the point only when the team can also say what the phrase means and give a situation for it. Otherwise one student recognises it instantly and the rest learn nothing.
Do the puzzles rely on knowing films and pop culture?
Some do — film titles are part of the mix — and that can be unfair to a student from a different media culture. Treat those as the lightest rounds, give the answer quickly if it is not landing, and spend the time on the idioms instead, which is where the transferable language is.
More games
The free ones need no signup; open one and play.
Share your screen, they guess out loud
Open it from Resources and share your screen: your student guesses the phrase, you reveal it, and the conversation starts there. Save your own emoji puzzles as a set.
Free to start · No credit card · Your student never pays
Your sentences, not a stock deck
Type your student's own words, errors or target structures into a set once. It saves to your account and the game plays your material instead of a generic list.
The game isn't the whole lesson
Open it from Resources inside the room your video, lesson notes, the Space whiteboard and 700+ ready-to-teach lessons already live in — so a warm-up is two clicks from the work it's warming up.
What came up gets kept
Add a word that comes up and it becomes a flashcard your student keeps practising between lessons — and the post-lesson AI report writes up what you covered.