Whose Life Is It Anyway

Setup

Each student will need one or two small pieces of scrap paper, each big enough to write a sentence on.

Activity

1. Students write a sentence about their life on each paper, using the target language.
2. They fold the papers or screw them into balls.
3. The papers are then swapped so that every student has new sentences (but they don’t open the papers yet). You could use the Snowball Fight technique, or collect the papers in a box/hat for students to draw from.
4. The students take turns opening a paper and reading the sentence aloud. After each one, they and the rest of the class then have to guess which student wrote the sentence. A good way to do this is by counting down three, two, one… then on zero students have to point to the person they think wrote the sentence.

Tip: Make sure the students don’t reveal they wrote the sentence before guesses are made! Introduce the concept of a ‘poker face’ to help students have fun with this.

Target Language

The Whose Life Is It Anyway ESL activity can be used to practise a wide variety of tenses with beginner or intermediate classes. For example, students could write facts/personal preferences in the present simple (e.g. I have three sisters, I love hip hop).

Or they could talk about something current in their lives, using the present continuous or present perfect continuous (e.g. I am learning Japanese, I have been watching Game Of Thrones).

They could talk about past experiences in the past simple or present perfect simple. Or plans/predictions for their life in the future, using the future with going to, or the future simple.

This activity is perfect for students who are not completely new but don’t know each other that well yet. They will really enjoy finding out new, unexpected things about their classmates.