Introduction

This teaching idea combines acting with learning by having children act out the main parts of the fairy tale: Snow White and the seven dwarves. With each scene the students will be able to get to know more about the story and are able to successfully play a game of "Guess Who?" with the main characters.

Target group and Time

This game is best for student groups with good enough English skills to be able to understand written sentences and also know past tense. Grade 5-6 is ideal but it also depends on the individual English levels. It is set out to fit into a 12 minute time slot but can easily be adapted for longer parts of a lesson.

Learning objectives

Through this activity the children will learn about a (new) fairy tale, practise their reading comprehension and acting skills and will also be able to get to know new vocabulary in a fun and engaging way. The guessing game (part two) will test their ability to connect the collected information from the acting scenes with specific character questions, also focusing on their comprehension of what they saw, read and heard.

Instructions to set up the activity

First, the students are introduced to the group theme of fairy tales and are asked, whether they know the story of Snow White or not (“raise hand if…”). Afterwards they get told about the two parts of the activity: Part one being the acting and part two being the guessing game. Then the teaching starts by asking for the first volunteer to act out the first small scene.

Letting it run

Part one: acting out the most important parts of the fairy tale:

- one student gets a piece of paper containing the character they are portraying and a one sentence description of what they are doing in this scene.

- when you are sure the student has understood the text, you let them take the “stage” and they will start interpreting the text into a small acting scene/ movement

- once the scene is done, you ask the watching students what they think has happened in the scene and what character(s) were visible right now. Let them explain what they see/ what is happening.

- after that the next student (volunteer) takes the next piece of paper and acts their small scene, which is also talked about after to make sure every student understands every scene.

- this goes on until every scene has been acted out.

- (Sometimes two scenes happen simultaneously, so you have to know, when to keep a student on stage/ when to have two people acting together.)

Part two: playing “Guess Who?”:

- five students are each secretly assigned one of the main characters (by giving them a piece of paper with the characters name on it)

- only the students with a character know which character they are

- after that, yes/no-questions are distributed to the students until there are none left (characters also get questions and students can have more than one piece of paper)

- once all the pieces of paper are gone you ask for a volunteer with a character name

-  this “character-student”, for example Snow White, can step into the middle of the circle.

- the other students now have to guess which character the student represents, by asking the question written on their paper. The student in the middle hast to answer truthfully wis “Yes I have.” or “No I have not.”

- once the students have figured out that it is Snow White, the next “character-student” can look at their paper and a new round of questions can begin.

Note:

- multilingual aspects can be introduced at multiple stages of this game. For example:

- talking about the apple in one of the acting scenes: “Does anyone know what apple means in a different language?”

- “Do you know what Snow White means in a language other than English?”

- etc.