Headline gap fill - practising vocabulary

On the BBC comedy panel programme Have I Got News For You, in the final round, the panellists have to guess missing words from headlines from the week's news.

(They did a similar game called Supermatch on Blankety Blank, too.)

In December I saw this headline on the BBC news website :

Gwen Stefani has Mariah Carey sized goals.

For a giggle I decided to play a gap fill game with my social media followers. 

So I gave them this:

Gwen Stefani has Mariah Carey sized ____________.

As you can imagine, the answers ranged from sensible to funny to quite risqué to obscene.

What did you expect? They are my friends!

As with most silly ideas, I wondered how I could use this in my classroom.

A starter activity with an element of competition.

You can do this with groups of all abilities and ages.

Give the students a sentence with a blank (or blanks) and get them to guess the missing word(s).

Students who come up with the correct answer (or the funniest answer) win points.

And what do points make?

Prizes!

And safer railways!


Some examples:

Emmanuel Macron a un ___________.

Dans ma ___________ j'ai un __________ orange.

Chaque samedi mon voisin fait ___________.

Justin Bieber semble être ___________.

Les Français sont devenus accros à ___________.
  

You could think of hundreds more, I'm sure.

PS I've just been reminded of a blogpost by Clare Seccombe all about using Blankety Blank as a classroom activity.