Lesson Share: Mingle activities: Fish and chips

Procedure

• Prepare a list of well-known pairs of words. These could either be well-known people or television characters (for example, Tom and Jerry) or widely used collocations such as ‘fish and chips’ or ‘bread and butter’.
• Then prepare a series of cards, writing one word from each pair on each card. Give each student a card and ask all the students to stand up.
• They should then fix their card, using blu-tac or a safety pin to the back of another student in the group, without telling them the word on the card. Each student should now have an unknown word on their back.
• Their task is then to find out what the word is. They may only ask other members of the group ‘yes/no’ questions: 'Is it a person?', for example. At this stage they can only ask one question to each member of the class before moving on to the next student. This should ensure the maximum amount of mingling.
• When they have worked out what their word is, their task is to find their partner.