Twenty Questions

Most language teachers find that there is a bit of dead time during class. This may occur at the beginning of class, as the students are arriving; at the end of class, as they are thinking about leaving; and right in the middle of class, when transitioning from one lesson to another. During this dead time, the best option is to spend five or ten minutes on a short, interesting activity, like Twenty Questions.


Set up

On small slips of paper, write words from a vocabulary group, such as animals, with several slips for each one; you want to end up with a total of four or five groups. Give each student a slip of paper, but tell them to keep their animal a secret.


Activity

The participants are to find the rest of their kind, by asking questions in French about what the animal is like. Once two of the same kind have found each other, they stay together to find more. Play continues until all of the like animals have created one big group.


Useful for

• animals
• languages
• professions
• famous people
• asking questions

What kind of warm-up activities work best in your language classes? Let us know!

More warm-up activities