5 - Charade: to play and learn (PSE)

We can play charade to learn how to communicate when we forget words. ... We can learn how to listen 'deeply' and understand more than spoken words.

5 - Charade: to play and learn (PSE)

We have played a few games and learned a few English words.
Most words we have learned belong to a collection of words that we call "nouns".
A noun is a word we use to call a thing or an animal like book, table, cat, horse, .... The words for people in our family like father, mother, aunt, and so on, are also "nouns".

There is another collection of words we call "verbs".
Verbs are words we use to call actions or what-we-do like 'eat', 'walk', 'sleep', 'sing', ...

What other verbs do you know?
Can you say them aloud? One by one.
Can you write them down?
Please write them down, one verb on one piece of paper.

Now we have some verbs on pieces of paper.
We will 'shuffle'(ชัฟเฟิวลึ) them and we will play a game with them.
We will need an actor. Who wants to be an actor?

OK. You will take turn to be the actor. Let us begin with 'you' first.
I will pick a piece of paper in secret and show the verb to the actor in secret. The rest of you will not see what the verb is.

Now, the actor will act out the verb on the piece of paper.
So, if the verb is "eat", the actor will pretend to eat.
But the actor will not say the word to you.

You will have to look carefully and guess that verb for that act.
You will raise your hand when you think you know what the verb is.
But only when I call you, you may say what the verb is.
If you are correct, you will be the actor for the next verb.

This game is called 'charade' (ทึชา เหรด). We play it with verbs.
So now we have 2 types of words: nouns (I spy) and verbs (charade).
Please, please these games with your buddies.

When we come to class again next time, we will have another game to play.

[Dear Teachers,

This is a simple body language game, also known as (aka) 'gesture language'.
It is natural to act out what we mean when we can't think of the word for it.
Babies do it. Children do it. Adults do it. Everyone does it.

We can play charade to learn how to communicate when we forget words.
We can learn to look at other people carefully.
We can learn how to listen 'deeply' and understand more than spoken words.
(I don't usually tell people about the superpower we may gain by playing charade.)

It may help to find some boxes to put pieces of paper for nouns and verbs in. We will label two boxes first. One box we label "nouns" and another we label "verbs". We will label other boxes as we learn more.

You can play another game with your students with these boxes.
You can take all pieces of paper from the nouns and verbs boxes, shuffle the pieces of paper and 'deal' out the pieces of peper to students. Then ask each one of them to put the pieces in her/his hand into the correct boxes. Each student will read out the word on each piece of paper and put it in the box for that word. Other students may say "Yes, correct" or "No, not correct".

The reasons for boxes are more to do with the concept "Sets" in Mathematics. We will go into that later.

Note. To 'deal' cards is to distribute or 'hand out' cards (in a pack) to players.]

[ป.]

This is a brilliant game ! - I agree with "letter to teacher" that we could learn nonverbal language in the same time.

I am thinking - is it possible this game may be modified to increase level of difficult for advance player by specific to 2-words verb eg. shuffle,wrinkle, wake up (this is too difficult for me :-)

[sr]

Thank you Doctor Patama for your support

Yes. We can play charade for 2 or more words but combinatorial problem can make the game less happy to play. Advanced players often play charade to solve 'common phrases' or common mottoes.

For PSE, charade is a useful tool to map 'words' to 'gestures' and gestures to English words. Verbs are specifically targeted now because verbs are movements we can see and we want to map the movements into English words we can hear.

The problem most people have is that when they see a gesture they come up with a word in the first language first then translate that into English. We try to get from gestures to English words bypassing the translation as much as we can. Children are often very good at charade. (I have seen) They shout out the right verb as soon as the gesture starts.