Literacy with Miss P

Quizzes and trivia games are a brilliant way to bring friends and family together. Organising, writing and hosting a ‘Zoom Quiz’ online can be a great way to socialise whilst staying safe at home! Or you could simply write quiz questions for your family at home.

Not only is it a great way to reinforce prior knowledge, it’s also a great opportunity to do some further research into areas of interest! Although there are many ways to set up a quiz, the format outlined here is similar to a UK-style ‘pub quiz’ with a series of different rounds. So, let’s get started…

Activities

1) Choose your categories

Choose four categories to focus on. Choose areas that you are already knowledgeable about or that you’re interested in. Some example ‘general knowledge’ categories are below. General knowledge questions are great as they give everyone a fair chance at having a go at guessing the answers!

Some additional ideas for categories might be:

• Films – if you have a way of playing them to your audience, a nice way to do a film round is to show some short clips of five different films and ask your players/teams to write the title of the movie, or name the actor or the year it was released.
• Music – similar to the movie round, you might be able to play clips of a selection of songs for your players/teams to identify the artist and the name of the song, or write down the next line of the song…
• Picture round – You could also use images of book, film or cartoon characters for your quiz teams to name
• Art round – you could also show images of famous artwork/sculptures and ask people to name the artist (or even better, re-create the art yourself!)

2) Do your Research

For your written questions, you will need to research the facts and double-check these to make sure there are no disputes over the answers! Make sure your information is accurate and from a reliable source! Try to ensure you phrase questions in a way that only allows for one definite answer (you don’t want people to be writing whole sentences!). You might want to try 3 ‘tester’ questions on your audience to see if they’re too easy or too hard. A good quiz master writes questions that everyone can have a go at!

3) Write your Questions

Neatly write out your questions (and answers). For your first quiz, we suggest 4 rounds of 5 questions. So you might have 5 questions about geography, 5 about technology, 5 about inventions and 5 about music (20 questions in total). If you’re into technology and you have time on your hands, you might even type it up or prepare a PowerPoint!

4) Invite people to participate!

Whether it’s your family in the lounge or friends and relatives online, invite people to take part in your Quiz! Set a date and time and make sure they have access to an answer sheet (you can download the one below and send it to them, or they can just use their own pen and paper):

5) Host the Quiz

You might like to dress up for the occasion with a sparkly outfit or a special quizmaster’s hat. You might also like to prepare snacks and drinks for your guests. You might also want to prepare a prize or create your own special certificates and medals to give to the winners. You want to make it feel like a special event!

• Ask everyone to think of a team name and write this on their answer sheets.
• You call out your questions and allow time for each team or player to answer.
• At the end of each round, reveal the answers and mark each player/team’s answers. Keep a running total of the scores on a board that everyone can see. This will build excitement and anticipation!
• At the end of the quiz, announce the winners and give them their certificates and prize.

…Share and Connect!

We’d love to hear whether or not you enjoyed playing verb charades! You can either comment in the box below or post a photo on social media (you can find me on Facebook and Twitter) using the hashtag #literacywithmissp

Have fun!

Miss P x