Hi all,
I'm starting up a creative writing club with a couple of friends at school for 12-13 year-olds, so does anybody have any suggestions for good word/imagination/language/poetry games for about 10-20 people?
Unfortunately I no longer have it but I saw some interesting word games in a book of party games from the early 1900's. Some were easy others very tough. You might find a similar book in your area.
Hiya BA. Is it worth looking around at websites like this kind of one for ideas?
http://www.bonus.com/bonus/list/n_wordplay.right.htmledit:http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/http://dictionary.reference.com/fun/Even if you immediately discard most, you may get an interesting idea or two that would be manageable IRL without computer mediation. You could also try a panel-game type version of our Hogwash, with zany and plausibly mad mutiple definitions of selected words.
For poetry based fun, how about printing out a couple of poems that the group know/like/hate, then slicing and dicing the lines to make new poems, perhaps in two teams? Or, harder, one team set the other a well-known story (eg, Red Riding Hood) with the task of relating it in the general style of a printed poem offered as a sample (for example something by Keats)? I am sure Juan and Wordwind and others will come in with some muchbetter ideas, but maybe this'll get the other sleepyheads to help you ;)
Good luck - great initiative!
I used to love the game with an accordianed(oiks!) piece of paper that was passed around, with each consecutive student being instructed to write a word(noun, verb, adjective, etc... in sentence order) without any knowledge of the previous word(the paper was folded to obscure it). the resulting sentences would usually be quite funny.
Word scrambles are pretty fun to solve, either by individuals or by teams.
It might require some work, but you might be able to come up with some kind of trivia game based on word knowledge. "What does the prefix 'macro-' mean?" (You could probably cull some interesting stuff from the AWAD archives.)
You might also consider bringing different types of board games (scrabble, boggle) and letting some of them break off into groups of 2 or 3.
Also, consider just having a fun time to share some favorite reading material. There's this hilarious bit of a short story in Pinker's "How the Mind Works" about how "meat can think" that I think 13 year olds might be able to appreciate. Pinker says he got this off the internet some years ago, but I've never been able to locate it. Anyway you start off with something like that maybe (or whatever you find funny) and then ask them in turn if there's anything they've read that was particularly funny. Of course, this would have to be planned in advance so those who wanted to contribute would bring their books.
Maybe just a short period where people discuss books - instead of reading them real time.
good luck,
k
Yes! The game etaoin describes is often called Exquisite Corpse; the rules aren't quite as stringent in the Dada version of it, but in either case it's a wonderful game. You don't *have to accordian (oiks!) the paper; each player can simply fold over what s/he's written, but must leave a couple of words on the following line for the next player to go on.
That sounds rather like a game called Consequences, where the paper is passed 'round, and each person has to add either the name of a man/woman, what they did, what the consequence was, etc... generally to hilarious (or rather embarrasing consequences) is that the rough idea?
yup. or it could be an alien, or something to do with bodily functions... (you did say 12-13 years-olds..., dincha?)
Yep, got that on the list, but was thinking more of some kind of fast, speaking-game - like the one where each person says a word that links with the last in some way... only more interesting.
I'm working on a variant of a game called Just a Minute at the moment, which some of the UK BBC Radio4 listeners of this board may have heard of, it involves a player speaking on a given subject for a minute without hestitation, deviation and repitition.
You know, that kinda thing.
eta:
yup. or it could be an alien, or something to do with bodily functions... (you did say 12-13 years-olds..., dincha?)Oh, I wouldn't
just associate those themes with 12-13 year-olds!
(Not after a couple of years on
this board at any rate!
)
Edit: Well, okay, almost one year exactly.
>each person says a word that links with the last in some way... only more interesting.
uff...
>Not after a couple of years on this board at any rate!
...da!
I played a game thirty years ago inspired by a mystery novel titled "The Floating Admiral" (c. 1931). Members of something called The Detection Club, all authors of mystery fiction -- Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, and others -- each contributed a chapter, seriatim, having to work with the characters and premises established by those who wrote before them. It was an entertaining experiment, 'tho not the world's greatest murder mystery by a long measure.
While serving in the United States Navy, I had long watches filled with total boredom during which nothing happened, but for which we were required to be present and alert. I was linked to similarly-situated others by radio-teletype. From the format of "The Floating Admiral" we invented a writing game which might work for bonzaialsatian's writers' club.
The sailor initiating the game would write a paragraph which began a story, perhaps introducing a character or setting the scene. The second sailor in line would then build upon that beginning by adding a second paragraph and send it along to everyone on the net. And the third. And the fourth. And so on.
It occurs to me that this could be done on computers linked by e-mail over the Net ... which did not exist when I was in the Navy. For us, it worked fine with the clunking of radio-teletypes through the long night hours of a midwatch.