Charades

This is a vocabulary game where students try to guess a vocabulary word based on another students' gestures. It can be played in small groups or as a class.

Required Materials

(ideally) Small slips of paper with current vocabulary words

Instructions

1. Divide students into groups - you can divide the class in half or into smaller groups.
2. One student in each group is given a vocabulary word, and required to use gestures to get the other students in the group to guess the word. The gesturer must be silent the entire time.
3. You may give students special signs to indicate part of speech so they can reduce the scope of possible words. Some other special signs are typically used in charades: 

• A tug of the ear is used to indicate "sounds like" (followed by gestures for a similar sounding word)
• Touching the forearm with fingers indicates a particular syllable in the word (the first time this is done, it typically indicates the number of syllables in a word.) So the person gesturing would first touch their forearm with 3 fingers for "elephant," and then could touch their wrist again with one finger to indicate they are going to make gestures that are for the first syllable.
• When the word has been guessed correctly, the gesturer touches their nose. 

Variations

• This game can be played for points between two teams, in which case a time limit should be set. During the time limit, only students from the same group can try to guess the word. If the student exceeds the time, students from the other group may guess the word. Whichever group guesses the word correctly receives a point.
• The game can be played as a race between two groups. Each group is given the same number of vocab cards. Each person in the group is required to draw a vocab word. When the group guesses the word correctly, the next person in the group has to draw. The first group to guess all of the vocabulary words wins.
• In order to make the game more communicative, one can ask students to use a correctly guessed word in a sentence for an extra point or a piece of candy.