I did this with my high school students recently and they had a lot of fun. I encouraged them to use as much English as possible. You can gear the vocabulary towards both high- and low-level students.
The instructions are in the PowerPoint, but here's the gist:
- Have students form groups of four or five (or whatever size groups fits your class).
- Give them a deck of vocab cards and make sure they don't look at them (there's a doc full of easy vocab below. Definitely make your own or ask your JTE which words they want!).
- Instruct one student from each group to pick up a card, put it up to their forehead, and ask their groupmates to help them guess the word. Make sure that they don't say the word OR its direct Japanese translation.
- Once they get it right, have them switch to the next person and so on.
I do a demo with one group while the rest of the class watches and they usually get it pretty quickly.
Link to the Google Slides Version: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jeoCtNU3xKiSxe38Q_aH3RHXQ0WHDEC5XMqxGf-Dh3k/edit?usp=sharing
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