Introduction

This game answers the questions: What are you doing? with a twist. It is inspired by looking at the playingCLIL Handbook. Students imitate a verb while the others ask: "What are you doing?" Then, the question is answered by saying "I am (doing....)". However, the person who answers has to say anything but not what he or she is actually doing. After that, the person who asked "What are you doing?", has to imitate the verb, the first player has just said and so on.

Example: Player 1 (imitating the verb: cooking)

Player 2 "What are you doing?"

Player 1 "I am reading a book!" (clearly not reading a book)

Player 2 (imitates the verbal phrase: reading a book) etc....

Target group

Since it requires a lot of concentration to successfully play the game, I would suggest to play it with children starting in 5th grade. Moreover, it seems as though it could be a little difficult to always find verbs and keep the game going, hence it should be assured that the students do already know some verbs.

Learning objectives

The objective of this game is to practice the gerund form of verbs. While doing so, new verbs could also be introduced by providing scaffolding. The language support could just be many different verbs with a short explanation for experienced learners and pictures for new learners of English. The verbs could be written down on different cards and just be visibly dropped in the middle of the circle, available for everyone.

Time

Maybe a short interactive introduction of about 5 minutes should be enough to get into the game. Furthermore, the game should not be played more than 10 minutes, because it can get quite repetitive after a while. Afterwards, the learning process should be tested to make sure that everybody has understood the new grammar and the new verbs. In order to do so, questions such as: "What did you learn today? What did you find easy? What did you find difficult?" could be used. I would generally refrain from testing the new verbs and grammar via a test, since it could be quite frustrating to be graded at something one has just learned and did not even have time to practice.

Getting ready. How to give the instructions to set up the activity.

Since the game can be quite confusing at the beginning, because the players have to concentrate on saying a different verb than portrayed by the other players, interactive instructions in form of "learning by doing" could be appropriate to set up the activity.

Also, a short table such as:

Example: Player 1 (imitating the verb: cooking)

Player 2 "What are you doing?"

Player 1 "I am reading a book!" (clearly not reading a book)

Player 2 (imitates the verbal phrase: reading a book) etc....

could be used to make it easier to understand the principle of the game. Nevertheless, please do not forget to scaffold! It is very important to provide language help, especially for new learners of English since most of the time they do not know many verbs, which could result in a highly repetitive experience for the players and the teachers.

To conclude, it took the children two rounds to begin to enjoy the game, but then they had a lot of fun. Their favourite verbs were: cooking, dancing, reading, and jumping.