Chinese Whispers - 5 min fillers {游戏学英语}

All teachers will be aware that it's always best to have too much prepared than too little, so it's always handy to have a stock of 5-minute fillers in your resource mind bag. One of the popular ones is Chinese Whispers, a game often played by children in parties or in the playground, where the first player whispers a phrase or sentence to the next player. Each player successively whispers what that player believes he or she heard to the next. The last player announces the statement to the entire group. The result is often hilarious due to errors being accumulated as the sentence passes from one person to the next.

Chinese whispers is actually nothing to do with the Chinese. It originates from the old (I hope) European stereotype of the Chinese language being incomprehensible. The term is now considered offensive to some people, so other terms are being used, such as Chain whispers, Telephone, Broken Telephone, Gossip, etc.

The other day, we read about how Tyler Bradt broke the world record for running waterfall. Here we see a sillier kind of record, the record for the longest chain whisper, but the whispered message is rather a novel way of doing something significant. Watch this and you'll see what I mean.