“HOW ARE YOU?” GESTURE GAME

“HOW ARE YOU?” GESTURE GAME

Submitted by Leanna Jenkins (Kobe City BOE)

Target Group: 3rd-6th year Difficulty Level: Basic Conversation

Activity Objective:

To practice asking "how are you?" and replying with various responses.

Procedure:

Before I play this game with my students, we first practice saying the responses to the question,

"How are you?" while doing different gestures that remind us of that feeling (ie: crying for sad,

stomping for angry, yawning for tired, etc). Students will then each get three point cards from the

ALT and JTE. Students will go up to their different classmates and play "rock, scissors, paper". The

winner will ask the losing student, "How are you?" and the losing student responds by giving a

gesture of how they are feeling. The winning student must then guess the gesture and if the winning

student can guess the gesture correctly, then the losing student must give the winning student a

point card. The students with the most point cards at the end wins.

Example:

Winning student: "How are you?"

Losing student: “I’m…” (gestures being sad).

Winning student: “SAD!”

Losing students gives one point card to winning student.

Materials and Preparation:

3 point cards per student - You can design your point cards however you like but the ones I made

for this lesson all have different types of emoticon faces on them. The students really enjoyed

seeing all the different silly faces and were quite competitive on collecting the faces they liked.

Making a large number of point cards can be tiring and are easily torn if they are not laminated. If

you have a small school, you might be able to make multiple decks of point cards as I have done.

However, you could also just make one deck to use in multiple lessons.

Division of Labour for ALT and JTE:

The success of this game heavily relies on both the JTE and the ALT. While explaining the rules of

the game, the ALT and JTE will do an example together on how to play the game. This is vital as

the students seem to easily understand the game after they have seen it played through once. I

recommend doing two examples with the JTE:

1) The winner guesses the gesture right and receives a point card

2) The winner doesn't guess the gesture right and does not receive a point card.

During the game, both the JTE and ALT are encouraged to play with the students. students who

run out of cards can approach the ALT and JTE and challenge them for more cards. Win or lose, I

give the students with no cards a card for playing with the teacher.

Suggestions and Advice:

Some students will be shy about using English with their classmates, so always make sure you are

encouraging students to use English and not Japanese. Lastly, try to practice the gestures a few

times beforehand as well as pronouncing the responses.