Three Chapters

Hello everyone,

First of all my apologies that I did not post last week. My week was a bit hectic and I did not get round to it.
I am back now 🙂

I believe most school will have broken up now and surely you have not made plans for every day your kids are at home.
Today I will be posting a book variation on a game I learned while at university last year.

This is a fun team game that kids can play with friends, parents and teachers.

What do you need? 

• Pens/ pencils
• Paper cut into small pieces
• A bowl, hat or other objects to put the pieces of paper in

Steps: 

1. First of all you need to make teams. The minimum amount of people you need to play this game is 4. But you can play it with many more people. 5 teams of 2 would probably be a maximum though, because otherwise there is a lot of waiting.
2. Let’s say you have 3 teams of 2 players each. You give each player 5 pieces of paper. You can give more or less pieces, depending on how long you want the game to last.
3. Tell the children to write down titles of books or book characters on these pieces of paper. Make sure to tell them they should keep in mind that the other players must know/ must have heard of the books or characters. They do this on their own, not in their team.
4. Tell them to fold the pieces of paper twice and put them in the bowl/ hat.
5. Then the game has three rounds. I will explain this before anything else.
   round 1: Forbidden word – one of the two team members opens one piece of paper and has to describe the book/ character to the other without using one of the words of the title. To make this a bit harder you can tell the kids they can write down two more words on the piece of paper that cannot be used. This might especially be necessary with the characters.
   round 2: One word – after round 1 all the pieces of paper go back into the hat/bowl and therefore round 2 will be played with the same books/characters. In round 2 the player opening the piece of paper can only use one word to describe the book/character. The best thing to do is to use a word that was used in round 1.
   round 3: Acting it out – after round 2 all the pieces of paper go back into the hat/bowl again. However, in round 3 no words or sounds are allowed to be made. The player opening the piece of paper has to act out the book or character.
   Because you keep using the same books/ characters the rounds should speed up and become easier every time.
6. The game works as follows. First determine which team will start. You can use a die to determine this. Write down a chart with the teams and the rounds. Then the first pair can start. Every pair gets a set time to get as many points as possible. You can determine what the time should be. When I played it we had a minute. One of the two gets a piece of paper and starts. If the other player guesses the right book/ character the team can keep that piece of paper and that is their point. Once a piece of paper is taken they have to stick to it. You can make it one rule that they can change it once if the character or book is unknown to the person describing it. Once the timer goes off the hat/bowl is passed on to the next team and so on. At the end of round 1 the pieces of paper per team are counted and the score is noted on the chart. Then the pieces of paper go back into the bowl/hat and round 2 starts in the same way.
7. At the end all the points are added up and that will determine the winning pair.

I hope you enjoy this game 🙂