“Eat Poop You Cat” Could Be A Great Game For English Language Learners

_Alicja_ / Pixabay

“Eat Poop You Cat” (I have no idea who came up with that name) is a great game I recently learned about – it’s a variation of the Telephone Game (one person whispers a phrase in the ear of one person, then they do the same to the next person, etc.), which is an old stand-by in ELL classrooms for practicing speaking.

In EPYC (I’ll abbreviate the name of the game for the rest of the post), one person writes a sentence on a piece of paper, passes it to the next person who has to draw it.  Then, that person folds the paper so the next person can’t see the sentence – only the picture.  That person has to write a sentence describing the picture.  They fold the paper so the next person can’t see the picture, only the sentence.  They pass it on, and that next person draws a picture using that sentence as a guide.

While this is going on, everyone has a paper and is either writing a sentence or drawing.  At the end, everyone can have fun seeing each unfolded paper and how they evolved.

You can see a more detailed and illustrated explanation of how to play it here.

I had ChatGPT create a game handout, including some sentence starters, which you can download here.

I’m having a hard time visualizing how this would work out in a way that not everyone is either doing all sentence-writing or all drawing all the time.  I asked ChatGPT for suggestions about it, and none of them seemed very workable.  I think the easiest way to deal with it, if it’s a problem, is just play two short games – maybe stopping each at six “turns.”  At that point, see what people came up, and then give everyone a fresh hand-out.  In the second game, if they wrote sentences in the first game, they start off drawing, and if they drew, they write sentences.

Or, perhaps I’m overthinking this.

There’s a free game version of this you can play called Exquisite Monster, and you can play in a closed virtual room.

There are also online games of completely different drawing versions of the Telephone game.  One’s called Drawception and the other is DrawPhone.

I’m adding this info to:

The Best Ideas For Using Games In The ESL/EFL/ELL Classroom

The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms”