Delighting the brain with riddles!
Manaswini Sridhar
As a teacher who is forever exploring and experimenting with possibilities of using different kinds of exercises for both listening and speaking, I have always found the world of riddles fascinating and appealing. Websites such as http://www.funenglishgames.com/funstuff/funnyriddles.html and http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/games/riddles/not_so_hard_rd1.htm are only a few examples that we have of riddles on the Internet; they offer such delightful opportunities for the teacher/parent to help the child play with words and understand multiple meanings within a given context. Children love to rack their brains and disentangle the answer using both language skills and cognitive skills. Some riddles are simpler, and therefore children come up with the answers at the snap of a finger. Example: This is an animal that you count when you can’t sleep. (sheep) However, when the riddles get a little more elaborate, and make more demands on the child’s language skills, speculating, guessing and conjecturing sometimes make a lot of demands on the child’s patience. The child then doesn’t endeavour to probe into the riddle posed because as far as the child is concerned, the answer can be anything under the sun, and therefore he/she doesn’t feel interested enough to unravel the puzzle.
Giving children options spurs them on, motivating them to deliberate on the riddle and to view it from all angles. Example: What has a neck, but has no head, and yet wears a cap? (a bottle) Only children whose vocabulary has progressed adequately to understand that the lid of the bottle is also called a cap, and the long portion of the bottle is called a neck can crack the riddle. So, isn’t it great to have riddles in the class to test children’s language abilities? It is also a good way of testing their listening skills! As a teacher, if you request the children to call out the riddles, it also becomes an equally good way of assessing their speaking skills. The intonation and pronunciation of the child have to be clear for the other children to firstly understand the riddle, and then be able to solve it.
How about giving children a grid like the following? The adult/teacher calls out the riddle in random order, and then gives children the time to number the correct answer/picture. Once the exercise is completed, children then call out the right answer and also justify their answer. For those interested in using this grid, the clues have been given below. Other activities that can be integrated into the exercise have also been suggested.
- The national fruit of India (mango)
This is more of a general knowledge question; it is a good idea for children to have an assortment of riddles. For those who are still at the beginning stage of language learning, straightforward riddles or questions are confidence boosters. - If you take off my skin, I don’t cry; but you will! (onion)
Children will learn to correlate onion with the outer layer or skin. - It has a single eye, but cannot see with it. (needle)
Children understand that one doesn’t just see with the eye; one is also able to thread the needle because of the eye of the needle. They also learn to appreciate that the size of the eye varies, like it does in human beings. Teachers can demonstrate this by bringing to class different kinds of needles and having students experiment with different kinds of thread: nylon, cotton, silk, and wool. This is definitely a lesson in life skills! - If you remove the last letter from the name of this country, it becomes a part of your body. (China/chin) I have put in an illustration of the dragon that is synonymous with the Chinese culture; however, it is also possible to use a clipart of the Chinese flag or even the Chinese script. The general knowledge of children will increase in this manner.
- This grows on your head. Many people go to the saloon to take care of it! (hair)
What is the name of the person who cuts your hair? What are other words associated with this profession? (barber, hair stylist, beautician, hair dresser) - Here is one that will make the children think, but the astute ones will jump right at the answer if they observe the image in the grid intently. There are five apples in a basket and five children. How do you distribute the apples in such a way that each child gets an apple, and there is still an apple left in the basket? (give a child an apple along with the basket) What has the child learned from this riddle? Is it vocabulary, preposition or logical reasoning? Actually, much more than you or even the child would have realized!
- What kind of room has no doors or windows? (mushroom) To arrive at this answer, the child needs to do some lateral thinking because the child has to relate the parts of a room/house to the mushroom. It seems incredulously simple for an adult, but for the child who unravels the answer, it is not only rewarding, but leads him/her to look closely at the word and at other words with the suffix room. Children come up with other words like guestroom, bathroom, washroom, pressroom, and storeroom! What a way of recalling words with the same suffix!
- The more you take, the more you leave behind. (footsteps). Get children to think of all the words that they know with the prefix foot. (football, footway, footwear, footwork)
- Here is one that tests the children’s collocation knowledge. You serve this, but you cannot eat it! (tennis ball) Ask children: What else/Who else can you serve? (Food, dinner, salad, the family, in the army, the nation)
- What kind of tree can you carry in your hand? (the palm tree). Which is the silent letter in the word? (l) What are some other words that have a silent l? (island, isle, half, walk, chalk)
- What has to be broken before you use it? (an egg) What are the parts of an egg? The shell, the yolk, and the whites.
- If you give it food, it will live; if you give it water, it will die. (fire) What are some of the words associated with fire? (blaze, glow,
flame, flicker)
If you want to carry this activity further, have the children use the pictures to write a short story. Do not give them more than 15 minutes to think of a story. Here is an example:
There was once a girl with long hair in China. She asked her mother if she could invite her friend over for dinner. Her mother agreed. The mother went to the market to get onions and eggs. She came home, lit the fire and began to cook. She remembered that she had some mushrooms and made mushroom soup. Her daughter’s friend, Sara, came exactly at 6:00. She gave mother a basket of apples. The girls played outside and came in when mother called them, making sure to wipe their feet on the doormat so that they did not dirty the room with their footsteps. Sara talked about her trip to India and described the beautiful palm trees she had seen, and the mouth-watering mangoes that she had eaten! Sara thanked mother for the meal and helped with the dishes. Sara stayed for a while, playing catch with an old tennis ball while mother picked up her sewing needle to darn an old shirt.
The power of any worksheet lies in our ability to use it in as many interesting and innovative ways as possible. There is a whole world of worksheets available on the Net; all you need to do is to don your thinking cap and figure out how effectively you will use it!
The author is a teacher educator and language trainer based in Hyderabad. She can be reached at manaswinisridhar@gmail.com.
