Mind Reader

If you have never played Mindreader with your student then I want you to whip this out out next week. Trust me your students will love it. Grade 3 upwards through high school I have been told.

To play mindreader you will need to write all your vocabulary words or chunks on the board or project them onto a screen so all your students can see them.

Then with a mini whiteboard and whiteboard marker, choose one of the words on the board and secretly write it down on your mini whiteboard. Your students then have to guess (or "read your mind") to find the word written on your whiteboard.

Sometimes your students might get it on the 3rd of 4th go, other times it will be the last word! I repeat the word after they have guessed it to demonstrate pronunciation and it’s amazing how quickly they will pick up the words.

After a few turns as a whole class, I usually ask students to break into groups of 2-4 students, each with a whiteboard and marker, and students play in little groups for 10 - 15 minutes.

I love this game for so many reasons...

1. It’s so low prep it has become my go to when I need a good quality filler!

2. Students love it!

3. They don’t even need to know what the words mean to play this game, so it is accessible to all your students at all levels, and when they later encounter/read/ are taught the meaning of the word they will acquire it so much quicker!

4. My students are speaking! In Indonesian! In a low stress accessible way. It just warms my heart to have all this talk going on around me using all the words with mostly really great pronunciation.

Seriously I could not love this game more.

If you are a resource member I will be uploading some slides you can use that match the units we have. Rumah Slides are up currently in a new section called 'digital'.

If you are in our free community you will find a Rumah slide for mindreader that matches our free until on our freebie page. But you really just need to write on your whiteboard the words your kids know or will be learning. Too easy.

This game I learnt from The Language Teacher Toolkit by Conti & Smith, and there are so many good games and activities, mostly for grade 6 and above but I have adapted a few to suit primary years. But mind reader is gold! So check out his blog. 

Or buy his book on book topics or Amazon or wherever you get your awesome books!

*Not an affiliate! I just love their books and ideas, and finding ways to adapt for Primary school students.