For this game, you will need to print this sheet as many times as there are students in a class. If you would like to save on paper and color ink, I recommend laminating a set of sheets to be used over and over again for each class of １年生 that you have. If you have enough white board markers for a class, that would help make things easier, but you can also have the student use their own highlighters since in my experience, those can be rubbed off pretty easily. If you'd like, this could also be done online with Loilo Note or whichever program is available in your schools.
The way my JTE and I organized this class was in the following way:
1) Tell the kids what the name of the game is, and explained that it was meant to get them to practice the grammar points "Are you~," "Do you~," and "Can you~"
2) Pass out the laminated sheets so that they can see the characters and celebrities that are included
3) Demonstrate how a round of the game is supposed to go with the JTE (choosing a character secretly, taking turns to ask each other questions to narrow down the chosen character, write an X over the characters you have eliminated as options)
4) Ask the class to give examples of the kinds of questions they can ask, writing them on the board. This also gives them a chance to learn some words not included in the textbook yet (for example, "crown" was new for my kids). Some examples include:
- Are you a man? Are you from Japan? Are you a boy? Are you real? Are you a Disney character? Are you old? Are you a singer?
- Do you wear glasses? Do you play a sport? Do you have red hair? Do you have a crown? Do you speak English? Do you have a hat?
- Can you sing well? Can you play baseball? Can you do magic? Can you talk with animals?
5) Tell the students to make pairs and start playing the game and start a timer (perhaps for 5 minutes)
6) Tell the winners to stand and move to a different person for the next round
Feel free to replace any of the characters or celebrities! The ones that are included were chosen to give a variety of ages, physical attributes, backgrounds, etc. while still making sure there were similarities with some of the others present (I made sure to make them all humanoids, so if you decide to replace one of them with, say, Mickey Mouse, I suggest you also replace some others with other rodent characters so that the question "Are you a mouse?" doesn't narrow it down too quickly). I also aimed to have all the characters and celebrities be recognizable to the kids (and I will tell you now that my students didn't know who Barbie was, and that shook me).