English Shiritori challenge

In Japan nearly all students are familiar with the word game called shiritori. People take turns to try think of a word that starts with the last letter of a word that another player says. For example, someone says BANANA, the next person should say a word starting with “A"....for example APPLE and the next person comes up with...ELEPHANT. So, this game is a paper based English language version of the game.
How to do this activity in a class??
I have done this activity with 5th and 6th grade elementary school students. They have a picture dictionary that accompanies their text book. I ask them to make a lunch group, use their picture dictionaries and solve the English Shiritori Challenge sheet. A tricky thing is the last letter of each word, they are often great at the first letter but not the last. I recommend to float about the class and see if they are doing ok. I really recommend that you let them do it in groups and then stronger students can help weaker ones.
For these grades I also draw hints about the words.
For older students it should be fun to just solve alone without any visual hints.