Step-by-Step Instructions
This communication skills activity brings powerful learning moments through entertaining mime and storytelling. Charade Line demonstrates how messages can transform as they pass from person to person, creating both laughter and insight. Corporate trainers and teachers appreciate how this simple story-telling exercise naturally reveals the challenges of information sharing while keeping participants fully engaged. Whether in workshops, classrooms, or team meetings, the activity’s blend of entertainment and education makes complex communication concepts tangible and memorable.
Charade Line – Communication Skills Activity
- Optional: Visit the Resources tab to download a set of sample storylines to inspire your group’s initial creativity.
- Gather your group, facing a ‘performance area.’
- Ask five volunteers to form a straight line facing side-on to the group, standing about a metre apart from each other.
- Tap the closest volunteer on the shoulder, inviting them to turn around and face you.
- Proceed to mime a 20 to 30-second story that features lots of action, intricate movements, use of imaginary props, etc.
- As the ‘storyteller,’ you cannot speak or use any verbal communication whatsoever.
- Other than the audience, only the first person you tapped will have witnessed your story.
- Once your story is complete, the first volunteer taps the shoulder of the next person in line and proceeds to re-tell the story as best as they can remember it.
- This process of re-telling the story continues down the line until the fifth and final person witnesses the story.
- The storyteller may only mime their story once.
- For fun, ask each person starting from the very last person to explain what they saw happening in the story.
- Conclude by performing the original story again, mostly for the benefit of your group of volunteers.
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Loved this activity for teaching elementary students how to focus on nonverbal communication, such as body language and facial expressions. After a group discussion, I explained this activity to be a bit like the game, ‘Telephone’ but without speaking. I did need to shorten the role-play ideas though and added some of my own. Later, I received a lot of positive feedback from students and staff.
This is a fantastic way to connect this game to your curriculum, Jeanette. Well played.
i wonderrrrr…… what if we reversed the roles? one person guesses the story being told by multiple people at the same time? framing could be about how we get so much information from different sources, and the challenges that go with this – interpretation, comprehension, understanding, sense-making, empathy, conflicting messages, et al
variation – this could be done in two teams, both giving the message at the same time (phrase, sentence, or one word – related to the topic).
we’ve done this at the end of a workshop, with a different intention – super high energy!
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You’re a genius JeWElle, I like this idea a lot. I must remember to try this next time I pull this game out of the bag 🙂
Great activity demonstrating the subtleties and challenges regarding communication and what is required of both the “speaker” and “listener” to keep a message clear and understood.
Recently participated in this activity and it highlighted that despite the best intentions and abilities of a speaker and the receiver of a message, how quickly and easily messages can be distorted beyond recognition. The results were hilarious in that setting.