Taboo

The game of Taboo is one of my favorite party games and here's an idea how to use it in class when revising vocabulary. The game itself is a word guessing game, which is played in pairs. The objective is to have your partner guess the word you are describing without using that word and another three to five words written on the same card. 

 You can make your own taboo cards for a specific topic, but you can also make a Power Point presentation in which you put a word (or a picture of it) and some other words that are closely related to that word, but may not be used. If that's the case, you can divide your students into teams and they can play against each other. A student from each team has to come forward and sit or stand with his/her back to the screen and then the rest of his/her team have to describe the words. If the student guesses the word, the team gets a point and then it's another team's turn. You can even measure their time, so just give them a minute to try and guess the word to spice it all up.

I absolutely love this game! I played it in class a few years ago, just when I started my studies and it was a bit difficult for me the first time I tried it, because we did it in German and we played it with the real game, so some words were just too much for me at that level. However, I had so much fun with it and so did my colleagues. It really makes you think outside the box and use some compensation strategies. Just make sure to adapt it to your students' level.

How do you usually revise vocabulary? Have you ever used Taboo?