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This game is especially useful in lessons on avoiding gossip and backbiting, as it helps demonstrate how gossip tends to alter and pervert the truth of a situation as it spreads, with details of a story changing, becoming exaggerated or even completely untrue. It also helps young children to moderate their voices, by forcing them to whisper instead of speaking loudly.
Variations
- Touch telephone: This variation is touch-based, rather than sound-based. The first player chooses a simple, but easily distinguishable object as the message, which he or she then draws on the back of the next person in the circle. Each person does the same in turn, drawing what they felt on the next person’s back. The last person in the circle is then given a piece of paper, and draws what he or she felt. Some good objects to try could be a fish, a house, a flower, a sailboat, a star, or a letter of the alphabet.
Photo: “lucia & the tin-can phone“, by Somaya Langley.