Describe a toy or game you loved as a child.
A card about a toy, a board game or a playground game from your early years. Memory is allowed to be imperfect here — what counts is the scene you can still picture and the reason it mattered.
The task card
Describe a toy or game you loved as a child.
You should say:
- what the toy or game was
- how you got it or learned to play it
- who you played with
and explain why you loved it so much.
Now say it yourself
Record your own two minutes on this card and have it transcribed and marked against the Speaking criteria. Practising is free; the band estimate is part of Pro.
Record my answerHow long you have
- 1 minute
Preparation
The examiner hands you the card, paper and a pencil. Make notes — a few words per cue point, never sentences.
- 1–2 minutes
Your long turn
Speak until the examiner stops you at two minutes. Finishing early is the most common self-inflicted problem in Part 2.
- 1–2 questions
Rounding off
The examiner may ask one or two short follow-up questions, then moves straight into the Part 3 discussion on the same theme.
Part 2 takes three to four minutes in total. The whole Speaking test runs 11 to 14 minutes across three parts, and Part 3 that follows lasts four to five minutes.
How to approach this card
Choose something you can actually picture: a set of marbles, a wooden train, a card game with one card missing. Physical detail in the first twenty seconds — colour, material, what was broken or lost — shows a real memory and warms up your descriptive vocabulary.
Childhood cards are a natural place for 'used to' and 'would' for past habits — 'every Sunday we would spread it across the floor'. Mix them with the past simple for one specific occasion so your tenses do more than one job.
'Who you played with' brings people into the answer: a sibling who always cheated, a neighbour's child, a grandparent who pretended to lose. One character with one habit is enough.
For the final bullet, avoid 'because it was fun'. Explain what the toy gave you — a world you controlled, time with someone busy, a first taste of winning fairly — and, if you can, link it modestly to who you are now.
Model answer
Speak your own answer first. Examiners are trained to spot memorised speeches and mark them down — use this to study structure, pacing and naturalness, never to recite.
Show the model answer
The toy I want to describe is a plastic marble run I had from about the age of six until I was ten — one of those sets with clear tubes and funnels that you clip together into a tower, and the marbles spiral down from the top. We didn't get it new. My mum bought it at a school jumble sale for, I think, two pounds, and it came in a carrier bag with about a third of the pieces missing and no instructions. That turned out to be the best thing about it, because my older brother and I had to invent the missing bits. We'd raid the recycling for kitchen-roll tubes and cereal boxes and tape them into ramps, and by the end the cardboard part was much bigger than the plastic part — it ran off the table, across the carpet and finished in a saucepan, because we liked the noise. So who did I play with? Mostly my brother, who was four years older and treated it like a serious engineering project. He'd draw plans on the backs of envelopes; I was more the chief tester, which mainly meant dropping marbles in and reporting the disaster. Why did I love it so much? Partly because it was the only thing he and I genuinely did together at that age — normally he'd have been out with his friends. But also because it was honest. If a ramp was too steep, the marble flew off, simple as that; you couldn't argue with it. I won't pretend it turned me into an engineer, but I still get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from anything where you change one small thing and immediately see whether it worked.
Why this works: Physical detail arrives early — the clear tubes, the carrier bag, the missing pieces — and 'would' carries the repeated past naturally ('We'd raid the recycling'). The brother is characterised by one habit rather than adjectives, and the final bullet gives two reasons, one about a person and one about the toy itself, with a modest link to the present instead of a life-changing claim. The structure transfers to any childhood card; the details have to be yours.
Useful vocabulary for this topic
- battered
Old and damaged from heavy use; affectionate when describing a loved toy.
- we would spend hours
'Would' for repeated past actions; natural, and it shows grammatical range.
- to make up our own rules
Useful for games that children adapted or invented.
- a sore loser
Someone who behaves badly when they lose; good for describing a playmate.
- to lose track of time
To be so absorbed that you forget how long has passed.
- nostalgic
Feeling fondness for the past; use it about yourself, once, rather than about the toy.
Part 3 discussion
After your long turn the examiner moves into a four to five minute discussion on the same theme, working from two related discussion topics with about three questions each. The first stays close to your own experience; the second widens out. Answer with reasons and examples, not one-line replies.
- 1How are children's toys different now from when your parents were young?
- 2Should parents limit the time children spend on screen-based games?
- 3Do expensive toys help children develop more than simple ones?
- 4Why do some adults collect the toys they had as children?
- 5What can children learn from playing games with rules?
More on how this family of cards is discussed: Objects and possessions. Model answers for Part 3: Part 3 questions and answers.