The cloud game is the first TEFL activity I ever learned. On day one of my TEFL course, our trainer wrote 6 answers to 6 questions about himself in a cloud on the blackboard. Our task was to work out what the questions were. It was a bit like Jeopardy, the well-known US quiz show.

I use this technique quite a lot to elicit question forms from my students. Of course, the questions and answers don’t have to pertain to yourself. Here is an activity that involves 5 pieces of information about the biggest animal that has ever lived on out planet.

1. Show your learners a picture of a blue whale and ask them what they know about it (you can easily find one using a Google image search).

2. Draw a cloud on the blackboard with the following 5 pieces of information about the Blue Whale contained within it.

3. Tell your students that you have given them 5 answers to 5 questions about the blue whale. Find out if anyone can supply the questions.

4. If your students find this task difficult, you can give them some help: Tell them that all 5 questions begin with the word How.

5. If your students still have problems, write the following gap fill on the board beside the cloud:

1) H _ _ m _ _ _ d _ _ _ i _ w _ _ _ _ ?

2) H _ _ b _ _ i _ i _ _ h _ _ _ _ ?

3) H _ _ w _ _ _ i _ i _ _ t _ _ _?

4) H _ _ f _ _ _ c _ _ i _ s _ _ _ ?

5) H _ _ l _ _ _ i_ i_ ?

6. Each time a student manages to identify a question, cross off the corresponding answer in the cloud.

7. Once all of the questions have been identified correctly, get everyone to write them down from memory. Well, I say memory but I mean grammatical knowledge.

This activity is a good follow up to a lesson that was posted on teflclips.