Charades
Minefields

Each row of students is a team. The first person in each row goes into the hallway with the ALT where they are given their task: "Stand up!" or "Eat hot pizza" etc.. Then, ALT and students return to the classroom where they mime the command. The first team to guess the command gets a point. 1st years must say, "S/he is eating hot Pizza", whereas 2nd and 3rd years must answer, "You told her to eat hot pizza". When the charade has been solved the next set of students can retire to the corridor with the ALT for their instructions.

This activity lets even the slowest students participate, and can be extremely funny, not only watching the students actions/mimes, but also when "Play table tennis" becomes, "You told her to sing Puffy". This is an ideal activity for use as a warm up or as a time fill at the end of a class. The commands can become increasingly more difficult: e.g., "Drink Pepsi Cola while playing basketball". Amazingly, some students even got this one!

A longer variation of this is to have the rest of the class face the back of the room (standing). The players from the corridor tap the first student on the shoulder signalling that they should turn around. They then have 30 seconds (or 45 for more difficult targets) in which to perform their charade. Time them (grab a stop-watch from the P.E. teacher), and call out "Time's up", or "Change!", when the time expires. The 2nd student then taps the 3rd student on the shoulder and performs what they think the mime is, and the process repeats down the row until the final student. The final student has to run to the front of the class and whisper to the ALT what they think the answer is. I.e., "You told him/her to...". If they are right their team gets 10 points, the next correct team gets 8, and so on. These students remain at the front of the class for the next turn, when all students move back one seat, and those students at the front retire to the corridor to learn their task.

Teaching Tip Rather than the class reading in unison, make dialogues a contest between rows, boys/girls, or odd/even S/s. Have one group stand up to read, then quickly sit down until their next line. Dialogues with only two characters and short lines work best with this. S/s are rising and sitting so rapidly, they forget to be nervous (make sure they remember to read and not just jump up and down).

View this page without frames (good for editing or printing)

Complete index ... without frames

Introduction (frames)