A Review of Reverse Charades

I ran across a tweet about Reverse Charades by Sarah Breckley (@SarahBreckley) and decided to give it a try on a whim as I had about 10 minutes left in a class. It was a good whim to follow!

You can see a video of Sarah doing Reverse Charades and read her explanation in this post. The basic gist is that rather than one person acting something out and everyone else guessing, several people are acting and only one person is guessing.

The Set Up & Procedure

I had 15 students so made three teams of five students. I set up three chairs in a semi-circle facing away from me and put a dry erase board/marker on each chair. One person from each team sat in a chair facing their team. I stood behind them and wrote a vocab word on a small white board, held it up and showed it to the four remaining teammates who then acted it out for their person in the chair. The person in the chair wrote their guess down in Spanish and held it up for me to see. The first person to show me the correct answer gets a point. Each round a different teammate guesses from the chair.

Pros

1. Super simple, quick set up.
2. Helps the kids that don’t want to be the center of attention acting, still engage in a physical way because it’s not just them acting and being watched, it’s a group of people!
3. It’s actually a pretty quiet game since the actors nor the guessers talk so no disturbing the neighbors (except for the victory celebrations!).
4. Now that the students know how to play, it’ll be a quick set up and a great filler activity.
5. Of my 37 students the played over two different blocks, all but 3-4 were actively engaged the entire time. There will always be a few that just stand around but they were the vast minority and they had to participate when it was their turn in the chair!
6. I have one very rambunctious class and was worried about them messing around or being off task and acting goofy but they were totally into this game and on task!
7. The fact that students write their answers on white boards and hold them up made it super easy to know which team answered first correctly. No more, “who said it first” anxiety!

Overall, I can’t recommend this activity enough. It’s easy set up, gets kids up and moving and is a great twist on an old classic. Thank you Sarah!