I played a cool game with my preteen kids yesterday. I don’t know if I’ve written about them before. Their office nickname is The Drips, and their hobbies are plagiarism, monosyllabic answers and blank stares. Last week, 7 out of 8 kids insisted I’d never assigned any homework, but the eighth student had done the assignment and blew their whole story. And, Zorro was watching my class that day to learn about teaching teens, so he got to see my student sell out his friends for a watermelon Jolly Rancher. Yeah.
Anyway, I played a cool game with The Drips. The object of No Yes No is to make other people say Yes or No without saying it yourself. Each student asks the other students questions, and if the answer is Yes or No, the asker gets one point and then answerer (askee?) loses one. I did it by writing points on the whiteboard but if I did it again, I’d give the kids pennies or candies as tokens. We started asking in a circle until the kids got the hang of it, and then it was more freeform.
It was great to see my kids struggling to think of other responses, and even better when they started to trap each other, first with knee-jerk questions like “Are you ugly?” and “Do you like Jimmy?” but then with “Really?” and “Is that true?” For some of them, it was more talking than I’d seen all semester.
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