Chinese Whispers

I was looking for a way to make indirect speech and reporting verbs interesting for my FCE class and I decided to experiment with 'Chinese Whispers', or in Czech 'secret postman'. I think the concept needs a little more work but after a few false starts they got the hang of the grammar and everyone had a bit of fun.

The point of the game was to use 'reporting verbs' such as INVITE, WARN, THREATEN etc. The students were each given two such words and asked to make a sentence in direct speech without using those words.
e.g
"Will you come to dinner with me?"
"I will kill you!"
after every student had made their sentences and I had checked them to make sure they were all on the right track we attempted to play.

Person one whispers to their neighbour - "I will kill you"
Person two then translated that into indirect speech and hopefully using the original word says to their neighbour "Katie threatened to kill me!"
Person three then continues with - "Katie threatened to kill George" and that is passed in some form around the room.
In theory.

Of course it took a few attempts and I think a full practice run is a must but in the end all of the students made sentences which made sense, 50% of the rounds ended with at least the correct reporting verb and many laughs were had along the way so all in all I think it was a success.