Embarrassment Game

For the last six weeks, some of my Year 3 and 4 pupils have been doing an activity from my book entitled Brilliant Activities for Gifted and Talented Children called Rain Rain, Go Away.  For this activity, you imagine that you are in the middle of a move and are having three friends over to play.  The plan is to play outside, but it begins to rain. With limited resources, (cardboard, tape writing utensils) you decide to create a board game that is creative and different to any one that you have played before.  By giving the participants limited resources, you encourage them to use flexible thinking and risk taking. This is also a great activity for cooperative learning.  My pupils have worked for weeks on this activity and have been thoroughly engaged from the beginning stages.  The final product from one group is an Embarrassment Game.  I had to laugh at the things that they found embarrassing! Using the cardboard, the pupils created a game board that had pieces of cardboard that you would flip over for an embarrassing task.  There was also a place on the board for a smackaroo.  The pupils made their own smackaroo and had the most fun inventing this!  Some of the embarrassing tasks included singing a song, spell the hardest word you know, tell an embarrassing story, create an embarrassing word that you have never heard, and do the 'funky chicken'!  I was really pleased with the list which was taken from a previous brainstorm.  Also, the task of creating a word utilises the highest level of thinking in Bloom's Taxonomy. (Synthesis)  When the game was complete, the pupils had tons of fun playing their own game.  It is always amazing when you see four pupils come together on a task and enjoy it so much.  They spent hours on something that only took imagination, teamwork, cardboard, tape and pens and at the same time- lots of CREATIVE THINKING!