The Build a Temple game is similar to the Hangman game, except it is positive and thus appropriate for a church class. I think, and this is just my personal opinion, that Hangman is too negative for church classes. Remind the students that they are working together as a team and are not competing against each other.
Play the game as follows.
- Think of a word that pertains to the lesson, and write several dashes on the chalk-board, where each dash represents a letter in the word.
- Ask the students to guess a letter. If their letter is in the word, draw a rectangle on the board, and write that letter above the appropriate dash. For correct letters, draw the rectangles as successively shorter rectangles, and place each new rectangle on top of the existing rectangles. If their letter is not in the word, remove a rectangle from the board. If a rectangle can not be removed because there are no rectangles on the board, just ignore their incorrect letter.
- Have the students continue guessing letters, and draw or remove rectangles appropriately until the word has all of its letters correctly written above the dashes. When the word has been correctly spelled, the students should have several rectangles on top of each other, with the rectangle-length reducing such that the finished stack of rectangles represents a temple.
Hint: Tell the students that every word in the English language has at least one vowel. This is a hint that the students should first guess vowels. It is likely that once the vowels have been identified, the word will be recognized by the students, and the students will correctly guess the consonants in the word.
Example: The final results for the word Smith (with no mistakes made) would look like the following.
Variation: of this game is to add rectangles to the board but not remove rectangles.
Allen's Mormon (LDS) Site 