Speak and Draw

Club SPEAK consists of students at my school who want to practice their English speaking skills. The club has been struggling to keep students attending regularly. In one of the meetings, I had the students who run the club brainstorm some of the reasons why students were not coming consistently. We decided to cut the club meetings down to one day a week instead of two and then we came up with some fun activities that would draw students in and make them want to return. One of those activities was the Speak and Draw competition.


Speak and Draw works by getting students to practice speaking and listening. Plus, they get to draw, so they love it! Students are split into pairs, one speaker and one illustrator. The speaker is given a picture (I tore some out of magazines; the more details in the picture, the better) which they cannot show to their partner. The speaker must describe the picture to the illustrator, who must then draw the picture to the best of their ability. At the end, the students vote for the best drawing, accounting for accuracy to the original picture. The students had so much fun and were challenged to use whatever vocabulary they knew to describe the pictures.

The winners of Speak and Draw! Unfortunately the flash on my camera washed out his drawing.

This boy's partner left before I could get his photo.

The accuracy of some drawings amazed me.

The students who helped judge.

The Michelin Man!

Rwandans have great smiles. The trick is getting them to do it.

I'm surprised this one didn't win.

This drawing got stepped on during the judging.

Club SPEAK