Back to School: Fun ELL reading and writing game!

I played this game with a bunch of small group friends last night and the whole time I was thinking that it would be an awesome game for ELL students to practice their reading and writing skills as well as vocabulary. I think it would be especially fun for a 1st day of school ice-breaker/get to know each other kind of game!

Materials you will need: 

• small pieces of scratch paper (if there are 5 students playing, each student will get 5 pieces of paper, 6 students 6 pieces, etc. )
• pencils

I would quickly prep the paper before hand and have it ready for the students. The example I will demonstrate today will be as if I was playing with 3 students so I will 4 pieces of paper and each student will have 4 pieces of paper as well.

Procedure

1. Tell the students to either draw a detailed picture or write a sentence with a lot of details on their paper. Give them around a minute to draw/write their sentence. In this example, I will start with a sentence. Once they have their sentence, they will pass their stack to the right.
   

   This is the sentence I came up with, the more detailed the better. If they just write a word, not too much would change!

     2. The next person will read the sentence and then draw a picture based on the            sentence.  Each round can last one minute so it is kind of fast and fun.

This is the picture that accompanied the sentence above drawn by the next person.

      3. The process continues so the student would now pass the picture they drew to the           next person and the next person would write a sentence based on the picture.  Eventually, it gets back to the original writer and then the game is over.

The next person interpreted the picture above as this so they wrote what they saw.

This was the final picture drawn based on the sentence! This is very different from the first sentence.

As you can see, this game is kind of like telephone but with drawing, reading, and writing. It is hilarious at the end when the students get their stack back and see how their original sentence has changed through the other student’s interpretations of the sentences and drawings. I plan on playing this the first day I have my groups to get to know their personalities and little bit and to get a very informal writing assessment.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you would play this with your students!