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Guess Who addresses a number of skills while a providing a fun, playful, and interactive experience with your child! Many of our therapists use this game both in speech/language and occupational therapy sessions. Here are some different ways to play and various skills you can address with your child using this game at home!
- Social Participation – This game provides an easy way to increase the comfort level of reciprocal communication with your child. Through asking questions in a back and forth manner, allows your child to increase their engagement and overall comfort level when communicating with a peer. If your child is feeling anxious, provide them with some additional prompts to increase their confidence with asking a question. This can be done by writing a possible list of questions they can choose from, to ease their anxiety, allowing them to focus on the reciprocal exchanges.
- Handwriting – This game can easily be used to incorporate handwriting practice. Have your child write out their list of possible questions to their opponent, a description of the person they selected, or the responses from their opponent. These handwriting activities can also provide some excellent cognitive functioning strategies, to help your child problem solve as they play.
- Turn Taking – This game has built-in natural turn taking opportunities, as only one person at a time can be asking questions. Varying the time you need to think about the question you would like to ask is a great way to provide your child with the chance to practice waiting their turn.
- Negation – As the game is built on answering “yes” or “no” questions, negation can easily be addressed in play. Modeling and have your child respond to “no” questions by responding in a complete phrase, such as “No, my person does not have ______.” Have you played this game with your child a thousand times? Try switching it up. Instead of asking questions to guess each others persons try describing your characters through use of negation (e.g. “My person does not have red hair.”). Whoever can get the other person to guess their character first is the winner!
- Descriptive Vocabulary – Guess Who is a great way to develop and encourage descriptive vocabulary (e.g. size, color, body parts, clothing items). If your child struggles with coming up with these terms, brain storm descriptive language together before a game and make a chart for them to reference. Your chart can use words to spell out the terms or draw pictures to represent them.
- Question Formation – Guess Who offers multiple opportunities for your child to practice forming questions using appropriate subject-verb agreement (e.g. Is your person a boy? Is your person ______? Does your person have _______?)
- Articulation – If your child is working on his/her articulation, there are likely many natural opportunities to practice their specific sounds at the sentence level. Identify with your child what sound they should be looking out for during the game. The /s/ and /r/ phonemes are some of the easiest sounds to work on in this game. How many times can your child practice these sounds in the questions and comments below?
“Does your person have_______?”
“Is your person a _______?”
“No, my person does not have _____.”
“No, my person is not _____.”
“Yes, my person does have _____.”
“Yes, my person is _______.”
Guess Who can be found at stores such as Target, Walmart and most toy stores. You can also find it online through sites such as Amazon.
Blog Post by Katie Woolard, MS, OTR/L and Anna Housman, MS, CCC-SLP