Simple global learning idea: Don’t Say It game

14 March, 2018

Explaining key concepts to other people can be a great way of learning the ins and outs of a topic. You can put an interesting spin on this type of learning by playing a classroom version of the ‘Don't Say It’ game!

Instructions

The rules are very simple. Pupils take it in turns to describe a word or phrase to the rest of the class, but must do so WITHOUT saying some of the most obvious key words related to whatever they are describing. They win by avoiding slip-ups and getting their classmates to correctly guess what is being described.

Here’s an example of how the game works: Global learning is commonly defined as ‘education for a fair and sustainable world’. So if you were asking someone to describe ‘global learning’ while playing this game, you might not allow them to use the words ‘education’, ‘fair’, ‘sustainable’ or ‘world’.

This is a very tricky example, but it’s still doable. For example, the player could describe global learning as ‘studying our planet and how we can make it a better place’.

When playing the game with your own class, you should use words/phrases related to whatever global learning topic you are currently looking at with pupils.

To keep things running smoothly, you might want to draft cue cards beforehand to give out to pupils. These should clearly state the word or phrase to describe, as well as the ‘forbidden’ words pupils are not allowed to say.

If you want to make things even trickier, you can add a timer into the mix and limit pupils to one or two minutes to describe their word! You could also split pupils into teams and use some sort of scoring system.

After the activity, it might be a good idea to gather feedback from pupils about the game to see how useful they found it as a learning tool.