Your language teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get students asking grammatically correct questions while trying not to laugh by using the improv grammar game ‘boogers’.
When I was a kid, we’d play a game at camp that we called “boogers”. The idea was that you’d ask a question (any question) and the person must reply with ‘boogers’ with an absolutely serious face. If you laughed or even smiled a tiny bit you ‘lost’ and it was the other person’s turn. As kids, it was difficult to keep a straight face, because boogers are hilarious! Some examples would be:
What is your favorite food? BOOGERS.
Who’s your best friend? BOOGERS.
What do you want to be when you grow up? BOOGERS.
How do you spell your name? BOOGERS
Now, I use this fun improv game in my classroom as a warm-up to practice grammatically correct questions, and also to have some fun! We play in small groups of about 4-6 people. The first person to start must not show any reaction on their face other than to say the word. (The word “boogers” may or may not be classroom appropriate, so depending on your situation, any word can be used. I choose ‘Un pingouin’ for my French classes, which I explain more about below). Students ask questions until Person A cracks (even the little uptick of a lip counts!) and then chooses the next person to be bombarded with questions. When the time is up (10 minutes usually suffices) the person who held out for the longest number of questions in a row wins.
Some variations/modifications:
If you notice that students are preternaturally good at this game (i.e. they are able to hold out easily, even under rapid fire questions, or really funny questions) then you can add an element of humorous challenge: actions! Wiggle like a penguin, say it with a high-pitched voice, also wear a silly hat… anything to help amp up the silliness!
For students who may need more guidance hand out sentence stems for forming questions and a bank of vocabulary
For students who need encouragement for expanding their question repertoire you can distribute dice and tell students they need to roll the die before asking their question. So, for example, if they roll (1) they must ask a question starting with ‘who’ (ex. who is the principal? BOOGERS!), (2) what, (3) where, (4) when, (5) why, and (6) how.
If you think one student might dominate the question asking, you can make a rule that everyone else must get a turn asking a question before a student can ask another
To not center specific students for any period of time you can go around in a circle where the person being asked a question changes, and it’s a simple collection of points (break or not break) that determines the winner
I teach high school, where boogers have lost (some, not all) comedic value, so I use the French word for ‘penguin’ which is “un pingouin”. I have several reasons for this:
Source: https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/musique/video-carla-bruni-imite-le-pingouin-dans-son-nouveau-clip_1263513.html
“Pingouin” is a very fun word for English speakers to say because it involves making sounds that we don’t normally hear in English
Because this is a difficult word so say, it is a great opportunity to introduce students to forvo.com, an excellent site for listening to authentic pronunciations in hundreds of languages
I can introduce this activity with a music video (see my blog post here for more ways I like to use music videos while teaching) using the adorable video of Carla Bruni’s song, “Le Pingouin”.
Because high school students are more able to keep a flat face, in order to make them more likely to break into a smile or laughter I will sometimes make them also wiggle like the penguin-people in the music video while they answer “un pingouin”.
To me, it is equally, if not more, funny, to answer questions like “how many siblings do you have?” with “a penguin” as it is “boogers!”
I tend to play this game during my comedy unit, which has a goal of mastering inverted questions. I usually play it the day after our Theatre of the Absurd lesson, as this is a good practice for questioning techniques and is very much an example of an inadvertent absurdist dialogue! Un pingouin is more in line with the absurdist nature than ‘boogers’.
During my comedy unit I open with each class with the word of the day, all of which are idioms. There are no idioms I know of that involve boogers, but there is one that is penguin based: Se sentir comme un pingouin dans le désert! (Feel like an outsider / feel like a fish out of water). This also works because I tend to follow this activity with my inverted questions idiom worksheet (resource can be found here).
Have you played this game or any of its variations? Share how it went in the comments!