Creative thinking can be nudged, prodded and poked by playing games that spark trains of thought and discussions.
A great ‘choice’ game to play is something called What Weighs More?
This is simply juxtaposing two objects, ideas or things and then asking pupils to commit and choose between them.
Your choices can be ordinary or surreal but I’d say the dafter the better. They don’t have to be opposites either or though many are. Homonyms can be interesting!
For example,
What weighs more, Spanish or German?
So whatever you choose in this example, just naming an answer isn’t good enough – you have to justify it.
You might say German weighs more because the umlauts makes some of the letters heavier.
You might say Spanish weighs more because it has heavier consonants (e.g. ‘s’ is the 19th letter of the alphabet. So if each letter corresponds to a value and you add up the consonants then Spanish would weigh more than German).
You get the idea.
The challenge is to find as many different reasons why one language weighs more than the other and the reasons you give can be off the wall or on the wall.
Try these.
Which weighs more?
- A shadow or a reflection?
- A buzz or a bark?
- A question or solution?
- A cough or a sneeze?
- An escape room or a waiting room?
- Fact or fiction?
- Silence or darkness?
- A hiccup or a burp?
- An antonym or a synonym?
- A verb or an adjective?
- East or West?
- Inside or outside?
- A hit or a miss?
- A nightmare or a dream?
- A decimal number or a fraction?
- Happiness or ecstasy?
- The past or the future?
- A barcode or a secret code?
When pupils offer a justification and explanation for their answer then their peers can challenge them and argue otherwise.
Which Weighs More? is a fun-filler for the end of the day or for the start of the morning as an early doors thinking activity.