Code Breaking Exercise. Good for writing period. Each student gets a handout with the codes on one side and the legend on the other.

The pyramid game is played in groups. Each group gets 1 paper and a dice.

The group asks "how tall are you?" and a student chooses where they want to move and answers with "I am ... cm tall". Then they roll the dice and if they roll a high enough number on the dice they can move up. They can choose to move to where another student already is and that is when a dice battle happens. The students will enjoy knocking other students back down to the start with a dice battle.

I never require the students to say it correctly in order to move, else the good students refuse to help the poorer ones. So they just have to speak and if they don't know the other members of their group have to help them.

I haven't tried this game yet so I don't know if it will work, I modified a game someone posted for teaching jobs.

I used this in my class (I only have 4 6th graders) and they loved it. They get really competitive with each other so they loved he battle aspect. I got to sit with my students and make sure they were saying the sentence correctly, before they could roll. And this is a great time sucker. If you need to fill a lesson, this is the game for you.

This is a simple reading and writing exercise for this lesson. The idea is that the students are all secret spies and hack into another spy's computer. They gain access and find an email but the email is written in code, they hack a little deeper and find the key to crack the code.
Questions 4-7 are coded but the sentences are also scrambled. Most of my students are low level and high energy and they all found it interesting and engaging. :)

I'm doing a demo on this topic -

I borrowed one of the quizzes posted here and spiced it up a bit (and changed a few questions - I wanted it to be equally focused on height and knowledge). Since my demo is focused on the reading/speaking skill - I only get students to write a sentence number on their small whiteboards. 

Oh, don't click on the arrows - I forgot to remove those - just click anywhere on the screen to proceed to the next slide.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B__OH0eUDwWHdWZyb0JlZ0xxdzA

Cheers.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B__OH0eUDwWHREhRclMyWnRYWmc

My second activity from the demo class.  Print out the pics in color and post them around the classroom.
Also printout the text description of the people (the text file has descriptions on the first page and descriptions with answers on the second (this one is for you - when you check the students' answers)

Give each student a printout of the description of the people.  Ask them to find the people in the pictures around the classroom and write down their numbers under each description - the fastest student to write correct number for each person wins.