Your favourite
Preparation: Clear a space so that participants can move. They’ll need to be able to stand in 4 corners of the room.
Tell participants you’re going to give them 4 choices. They need to decide which (of those 4) their favourite is. Say the first 4 choices: [tea/coffee/coca cola/water]. As you say each one, point to a different corner of the room. Participants choose their favourite and move to that corner of the room.
When everyone has chosen their corner, they have ten seconds to talk to the other people in their corner about why this is their favourite. Repeat the activity with other choices. For example: [breakfast/lunch/dinner/snacks] [teaching grade 1/teaching grade 5/observing another teacher/being observed] [sleeping/shopping/laughing/walking] [cricket/hockey/football/squash] Maybe you could ask one of the participants to act as the facilitator and think of 4 choices on another theme, like TV programmes or types of food.
My First Job
Ask everyone in the group to write down their name, their first job, and what they learned from that job. Then go round the group and have everybody read theirs out.
This is a chance for the group to learn something new about each other without getting too uncomfortably personal. It’s also a great warm-up as it doesn’t require too much thinking straight off the bat.
Variation:
If you want to add a bit of mystery to the ‘My First Job’ icebreaker, have everybody write down only their first job and what they learned from it (leaving out their name) and put their answers into a hat (or on an anonymous virtual Post-it note if you’re running a remote or hybrid meeting). Then have the rest of the group guess which first job belongs to which member of the group.
In this fun and active group game, participants sit in a circle, with one person in the middle. The person in the middle asks different questions that force people to quickly get up and race to find another seat. One person is always left in the middle without a seat. The game is fast-paced and highly physical and quickly generates laughter. An effective game to promote group development or simply to boost energy.
Step 1:
Everyone sits in a circle on chairs. There should be exactly enough chairs for the entire group, minus one. To begin, one person stands in the middle. He or she asks someone sitting in the circle: “Do you love your neighbor?”.
Step 2:
That person can reply with YES or NO. If she replies YES, then that means that the two people sitting to her left and right must to switch seats. The goal of the person in the middle is always to obtain a seat. When the two switch, he tries to quickly sit in one of their chairs. One person always ends up without a seat.
If she replies NO, she must extend her answer with “But I love people…” and add any characteristic that will apply to members of the group. For example “No, but I love people with long hair” or “No, but I love people who speak French.” Then everyone with that characteristic must get up and find a new seat.
Someone is always left in the middle and the process repeats.
The twist: Every time an empty seat appears to one’s left, they must quickly sit on it. This results in a chain reaction, where the whole group jumps from one chair to the next, making it more difficult to find a free seat to occupy.
Step 3:
End the exercise before it reaches it’s peak, when the group is still laughing and having fun. Generally about 7 - 10 rounds.
