Teacher's Childhood

Materials

• Paper or Whiteboards for each group to write on (I recommend two whiteboards per group if that's what you're using)
• A short list of 2-4 teachers that the students are familiar with (ALT and JTE can easily be included)

How to Play

1. If you think it's necessary, review how verbs change with the students. It might also be good to show them a list of verbs they might use a lot (play, visit, etc.)
2. Tell them they'll be writing about teachers. The students have to imagine what kind of childhoods did the teachers have. What sports did they play? Where did they live? If they went on trips, where did they visit? What snacks/candy did they like?
3. Split the class into groups of 3 or 4 and give each group their paper or whiteboards. Tell them the name of the teacher, and give them 5 minutes to write as many sentences as they can about their teacher. Have the students rotate who writes each sentence. So each group member writes one sentence at a time.
4. After time is up, have each group read all of their sentences out loud, and check if their guess is correct or not. For example, if it's you (the ALT) they were writing about, confirm if what they wrote actually happened. Did you play soccer? Did you visit Japan? How you award points is up to you. I did 3 points for a perfect sentence & correct guess, then subtracted points for grammar mistakes, but I always gave them 0 points if they guessed wrong. These are of course, points per sentence.
5. After checking the sentences and awarding points, have them erase all their sentences. Move on to the next teacher and repeat.
6. At the end, the team with the most points wins.

Other Notes

• A good list of teachers to use is you (the ALT), the JTE, their homeroom teacher (assuming it's not the JTE), and if there's any other teachers that help with the class regularly. You and the JTE can easily confirm the authenticity of the answers, but for other teachers, you might need to do some research first.
• I think very simple sentences like "He played soccer" or "She went to Hawaii" are okay. I think having them add "in high school" or "in elementary school" to the end of a sentence isn't necessary.
• If you're worried about them only using one verb, tell them that they have to use a minimum of 5 different verbs (or any other number) before repeating any. Or, you could say that they can only use one verb two times. That way they can't just write "He played soccer," "He played baseball," "He played volleyball," etc.
• I think you could change this to be a speaking game, where one student from each group stands up and says a sentence. But, if you do that, you have to stop them from repeating each other, so it lowers the points each team can get.
• Having the students read all their sentences takes some time. My students made about 6-8 sentences per teacher in the 5 minutes. So in 30 minutes, we only got to make sentences and check answers for two teachers. So if there's only you and the JTE, this activity can still take 30+ minutes.
• This is meant to be for when the teacher was a child/student (so elementary school through college). So, be careful. Things like "She used a car" might not be true for when the teacher was a student.