Back To School Activities: The Yes' - No' Game
Back To School Activities: The Yes' - No' Game
Back To School Activities: The Yes' - No' Game
This fast-paced activity is a perennial favourite with students because it is game-like and challenging.
Here is how you play it:
Students work in pairs (A – B).
Student A has to ‘bombard’ Student B with questions for one minute.
Student B has to give short answers, but they must avoid ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ – if they do, they
lose.
The idea is that student A keeps asking Wh-Questions, but from time to time they ask a ‘Do you…’ or
‘Have you ever…’ question or they throw in a question tag (‘You like dogs, don’t you?’) or they
pretend to have misheard or misunderstood something (‘Did you say you were married?’/‘Did I ask
you that earlier?’) in order to catch the other one out.
It is important that you give students a model before they play the game – and that you
demonstrate it a couple of times with a good student. If your students’ level is reasonably high, you
can use this audio clip.
YOU IN PICTURES
This is a humanistic activity where students share things about themselves and they try to find
similarities with each other:
Students work in pairs (A – B).
The teacher gives students (or projects on the screen) a number of small pictures (the sun, a
rabbit, a heart, a boat, a book … etc. – see the picture below).
Students use these images as prompts to ask each other questions (‘Are you a morning
person?’ / ‘Do you prefer hot or cold weather?’ / ‘What kind of books do you like?’ etc.)
They then ask follow-up questions trying to spot things they share in common.
Students love this activity because of the ambiguity of the pictures and the fact that they can control
how much they disclose about themselves.
ASK ME MY QUESTIONS
This is another activity which aims to help students get to know each other. The thing is that if two
people are strangers, not only do they not know much about each other, they also do not know
which would be good questions to ask; some might be inappropriate for a particular person, or they
might lead to very short responses. Not so in this activity!
Students work in pairs (A – B).
Each student writes down a number of questions they would like to be asked and gives them
to their partner.
Now the other person knows which direction to take the discussion to and can safely ask
follow-up questions.
For instance, a keen chess player may give their partner the question: ‘Do you like chess? Why?’
while a proud mother might give her partner the question ‘Do you have any children? … ‘
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