The following activity can be used in any language classroom or in your living room as a party game, depending on your needs. Even better, it requires little preparation, set-up, or explanation, and you can use it to fill in a few minutes of class time or to take up half-a-class if your students need practice for an oral exam. The only materials you need are a file of interesting, unusual, funny, and/or expressive pictures culled from magazines and newspapers (mine are all mounted on construction paper for easier manipulation) and scrap paper.
INSTRUCTIONS
Divide the students into pairs or small groups and give each student at least one sheet of scrap paper and a photo. The students must examine their own picture but keep it hidden from the other members of their group. Each student takes a turn describing his or her photo to the other members of the group using as much evocative detail and precise vocabulary as possible. The other student(s) in the group must draw a picture that captures the description that they hear. They may ask clarifying questions, but they are not allowed to see the picture being described.
After a few minutes, or when the describer has run out of things to say, have the students compare the drawings to the original image and see how close they were to one another. Have them discuss where they went wrong and how the two images are different. Now it's the artists' turn to describe their photos.
DISCUSSION
If you feel you need to debrief your students or if you are using this activity to prepare your students for a descriptive task on an oral test, you may want to cap off the activity with a full-class discussion of their successes and...not-quite successes.
- What details did they convey successfully? Unsuccessfully?
- Which aspects of the pictures were easy to communicate to the artists? Which aspects were difficult to describe?
- What information was most useful to the artists? Did the order of the elements described make a difference in how easy they were to draw?
- What could the describers have done differently to make the picture easier to replicate?
- Was there any vocabulary or grammar that would have been useful to know? (Prepositions to describe the relation and orientation of subjects in the picture? Activity-specific or technical language? Adjectives for color, size, shape, material, consistency, texture...?)
- What would the students do differently if they had to describe their picture again to a different artist?
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