Drawing Telephone: A Classroom Game

You can learn a lot from a comic book. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

Of course, I never really expected to find inspiration for this week’s Teaching Tip. 

But I did just that with the graphic novel “Page by Paige” by Laura Lee Gulledge.

The game is called “Drawing Telephone” or “Visual Telephone” and it works like this,

  1. Divide your class into groups of four or five players.
  2. Give each group one sheet of paper and a pencil. 
  3. The first person in each group writes a sentence on the paper. It can be any sentence at all. 
  4. The next person reads the sentence, folds it back, and in the next section illustrates it. 
  5. The paper is then passed to the next student. 
  6. The student looks at the drawing, folds it back, and writes the sentence of what they think it is. 
  7. The paper continues to be passed along and this until each player has had a turn.
I like how this game has students working with sentences. They need to translate an image into a sentence and vice versa. It takes creativity, it involves cooperation, and thinking skills. What a great idea!

More Learning From (and by) Comics