Balderdash

End of the year, exams and evaluations and such, but also more relaxed in some ways. We're here at the end, not a whole lot that can really be done in the time we have, and for a few of my groups, we've finished the books (read: I skipped the last few terminally boring reading and listening exercises. And I do mean terminal; you literally feel your pulse slowing down and your brain begins to enter a comatose state and they finish just when you notice a bright light that hadn't been there before), so we get to have some fun.
One of my favorite games is based on Balderdash, a variation of which is played on the most excellent radio program, Says You! I divide the class into teams of two or three, give each team a dictionary, tell them to choose five words they think nobody knows and write two definitions in their own words: one false and one true. When everyone is done, they take turns reading their words and definitions, and the other teams try to decide which one is true. There are several reasons why I like this game: one, they get to learn some interesting and random vocabulary that might not come up in a regular lesson (a sample of some of their choices: scampi, twit, vest, wiggle, niggle, plank, germ, amalgamate, arid); two, it's a creative exercise, thinking of plausible definitions and writing them convincingly in English; and three, they really have to think about the words, how they sound, how they are constructed, how they relate to their meanings. I love wordplay myself, and English is a great language for it.
Some of the definitions were just wonderful, and demonstrated real thought and consideration. Here's a few, as written by my students, unedited:
gulp: 1. drink without stop. 2. water dripping from the roof. (Going with the onomatopoeia)
backlog: 1. something you didn't do but you had to 2. escape from the program. (Just great, relating the word to the phrasal verb "log in")
creak: 1. the noise cosed (sic) by old furniture. 2. the narrow small river (I especially love this for its deviousness, using the definition of the homonym).
silt: 1. an animal covered with silver skin spending most of his life on the bottom of river. 2. sand or mud which remains after river flows slowly.
armpit: 1. the opening in a piece of clothing where your arm goes through. 2. the part of the body under the arm at the point where it joins the shoulder.
A few words garnered clean sweeps, fooling everybody. One was ascent, defined as "climb on the rock" and "confirmation which you get from the post office." Another was merry, which surprised me. After all, this was a fairly advanced group, who should all know "Merry Christmas." Yet, the definition that took them all in was, "it's a kind of drink made from beer and juice and whisky, and it's served in Italy." While you have to admire the creativity of the writers, it does maybe reflect poorly on me as a teacher that the rest of the class believed it. Nevertheless, we all had a good time, and that's the important part.