Guess Who?

Guess Who?

This game offers a fun way to pit the teacher against the students.

Standing at the front of the class, the teacher takes the pile of flashcards and shuffles them as you would a pack of cards. The students then queue up to take one flashcard each (without letting the teacher see what they are). They go back to their seats and it is now the teacher’s task to stroll around the classroom, attempting to guess which student has what flashcard.

To give the simplest way to score this game: one point for the teacher every time they guess correctly; one point for the students every time the teacher guesses incorrectly (of course you can experiment with this scoring system to balance the probabilities).

So to give an example: the teacher looks around at all the innocent faces of the students and decides that team A’s #2s has the [rabbit] FC. “Do you have the rabbit?” the teacher asks of this student. If the reply is to the negative (“No,” / “No, I don’t”) then the point goes to the students’ team and the teacher has to guess again: either asking the same student if they have the [lion] FC or by asking a different student if they have the [rabbit] FC. When a correct guess is made, the student must hand back their FC to the teacher and the point goes to the teacher’s team.

Once all the cards have been guessed and the teacher has all the FCs again, the points are tallied up and a reward is either given to the students (e.g., an extra game) or taken away (e.g., no extra game). Note though that it is not always necessary to offer or take away rewards once the game is over. The students are usually happy enough with getting one over on the teacher, and if you win, all it takes is a bit of play acting to let them know how happy you are to have beaten them.

One tip for this game is to say the FC first and then look around at the expressions and body language of the students to see if they give anything away, e.g., “Cat ... mmm ... I wonder who has the cat ...?” For this reason it also helps to allow the students time to show each other what they have before you begin the guessing game. Either the student holding the [cat] FC will look guilty, or the other students may sneak a glance towards the student with the [cat] FC.

There is also an option of throwing a bit of extra language into the game by asking for tips. For example with animal flashcards you might ask, “Do you have big ears? Are you dangerous?”, “Are you a big animal?”, “Can you be a pet?”, “Can I see you in a zoo?” etc. But this of course will only work for some types of flashcards.

Finally, once you have played this a few times you can get the students to be the teacher (for a modified version of Guess Who? see the activity FC Collector).