I thought it would be fun to make my students "date" each other for Valentine's Day. I made this activity for a class of 40 high school students, so there are 40 different character cards, each with 1 perfect match. In the PDF, the matches are arranged top/bottom (so Nezuko's match is Deku). The PowerPoint contains the instructions I gave the class, and the Word doc contains the instructions for the pair work.
Speed Dating Instructions:
1. Arrange desks into 2-4 big columns or "loops", desks facing each other. Hand out the character cards, boy characters on 1 side, girls on the other. I had the boy characters shift for every date, but it doesn't really matter which side does.
2. Explain that each card lists a character's name, age, likes, dislikes, and hometown. In order to get a perfect match, the cards must have 2 likes that match. BUT they can only speak about their likes, no looking! (My students were pretty good about the no looking, unless they got confused lol). If 1 of your character's like is another's dislike, they are NOT a match.
3. Show them examples of questions they could ask each other.
4. Set a timer for 1 min, 30 sec and start talking!
5. When timer is finished, boy characters move to the next date.
6. Once they think they've found their match, have ALT (or JTE) check that they're correct.
7. If they are correct, give the new couple the next activity.
Blind Drawing Instructions:
1. Give the girl character the instructions, the boy character a blank piece of paper.
2. The boy cannot look at the instructions, and the girl can only explain what they have to draw.
3. Once they're done, show to ALT to see if they're correct.
One of the bugs in this activity is that, by luck of the draw, some couples will find each other a lot faster than others. I had one class where the first date was already a perfect match. In this case, I encourage the students to do a few more dates to make sure they're correct, then I give them the next activity.
Happy Valentine's Day!
This is hilarious and interesting at the same time lol
The speed dating with character cards idea sounds brilliant. My JHS 3rd graders really like using English so I might prepare that for them. Thank you!
I've done this for all my classes and they had fun with it! They especially enjoyed seeing each other's drawings at the end! I had my ss just stand up and ask around instead, and when they found their partner they could just sit down. This sped up the activity, giving me time to show them their results! Thanks for sharing these cute cards!
I did this with my JHS 3rd graders today (using a different grammar point that they're learning.)
"If I were (character), I would like _______." etc.
My class had a lot of fun with it and they had a blast drawing the pair activity. 😂
It was kind of hard to do the drawing blind, so I told them that it's okay to open their eyes and look as they draw so they could see gestured hints from their partner! I told them that "not looking" was "Challenge level" if they wanted to try! Thanks for sharing!
Very fun and exciting. Looking forward to trying it out with my high school students.
I tried this out with one of my lower level schools and it went really well! I did it with 2 sensei in high school. There was a lot of laughing. The kids especially enjoyed the drawing task. There were 36 students so I had to take some cards out, which meant it didn't take as long to find their match, so we had 10 minutes at the end to play a game. I loved the creativity of this activity, thank you so much!
My students were really receptive to this game, its the kind of chaotic good I love haha! Thank you for your hard effort!! One thing that happened in class though was that while Tanjiro and Maki are perfect match, Bakugo and Maki also perfectly matched. Since I had less than 40 students in that class I allowed the pairing and replaced whomever had Power and Tanjiro's cards. (Power's dislike is one of Tanjiros likes so they'd never pair) Just thought I'd point that out if anyone else plays this game soon. Had I caught it before printing I would've changed Maki's dislike to Action Movies instead of Sad Movies. Anyways thank you again, really enjoyed this game!
@nylam Yes, this was something I somehow only figured out when using it again this year! I edited it in my own cards, but I'll make sure to upload a new copy for everyone. Thanks for pointing it out!!