ICE BREAKERS ADVERB GAME 2 EVOLUTION GAME 3 FLYING ACRONYM 4 HAND SHAKE GAME 5 HUMAN TWISTER 6 MUSICAL ANIMAL ACTS 7 TALK IT OUT 8 WHAT S IN YOUR MILK? 9 WHAT S MY NAME AGAIN? 10 BING BANG BUZZ 11 EXTREME HANGMAN 12 GRAB A HAND 13 HICKEY PICKET HOKEY POKEY DOO DAD 14 PARTY QUIRKS 15 WHAT IF? 16 WILL YOU PLEASE, PLEASE SMILE? 17 1
Adverb Game To build students observation and acting skills. Students must guess the adverb that others will model in various situations. None needed! 1. Send one volunteer outside of the room. 2. The people remaining in the room decide on an adverb, for example, quickly, nervously, happily. 3. Have an FMP call the student back in. The students must guess what adverb the class thought of by asking the students to do something that way. For example, a student would ask someone to shake my hand that way. If someone the volunteer picks does not want to do the action, he or she must say, I don t want to, but in the way of the adverb. 4. The volunteer can ask for up to ten actions, but after each command the volunteer must guess the adverb. When he or she gets it right, another volunteer is sent out into the hallway. Try to choose simple adverbs that are easily applied to basic actions. By Namrata Kodali 2
Evolution Game Promote communication, interaction, cooperation, and fun! 1. Describe five stages of the evolution process and their stances. a. EGG curling on floor b. CHICKEN squatting on floor like a chicken c. MONKEY hunched over with hands under armpits d. HUMAN standing up straight e. SUPER HUMAN standing on tip toes with hands in the air 2. Every person starts out as an egg. Every egg finds a partner and plays Rock, Scissor, Paper with the person. The winner advances to the next stage. The loser goes down to the next earlier stage (chicken becomes an egg, super human becomes a human, etc) if you are an egg and you lose, you remain an egg. 3. The winner is either the first person to become a super human OR person who remains a super human the longest OR everyone who is a super human at a certain time in the game. 3
Get students thinking and laughing. List of words. Flying Acronym 1. Have a list of 15-20 simple words. Write one word on the chalkboard. 2. The students go around the room and make the word into an acronym. 3. If the word was CALL, they might do Cool Alligators Live Long. The quicker the pace, the more fun it is. By Lindsey Diamond 4
Hand Shake Game To promote communication, interaction, cooperation, and fun! 1. Teach students four handshakes. a. LATTE HANDSHAKE Hold pretend coffee cup in the left hand and grab partner s right foot with your right hand. b. COWBOY HANDSHAKE Make pretend shooting gesture with both hands, then high five your partner. c. FISH HANDSHAKE Place hand on top of partner s hand and make a fish gesture. d. LUMBERJACK HANDSHAKE Make a fist with thumb pointing up, have partner grab your thumb and make his own fist with his thumb up. You grab his thumb with your other hand and make a fist with your thumb up. Finally, your partner grabs your thumb and makes a fist. Then move hands back and forth as if you were sawing a tree. 2. Pick a different partner for every handshake. 3. Leader yells out specific handshake and you find your partner and do the appropriate handshake. 4. You can make up your own handshakes (which might be better considering the descriptions I gave for each one.) The students can also make up their own handshakes. 5. You can continue to do this activity all year by yelling out a handshake during Advisory and having the students find their partners and doing the handshake. 5
Human Twister To get to know and be familiar with others. None needed! 1. Have everyone stand up in the center of the classroom. 2. Have the advisors yell out different colors. The students must use any of their body parts to make physical contact with another person wearing that color. 3. The advisors should continue saying different colors, and the students must maintain contact with the original partners while forming new contacts. Students cannot touch anyone else twice. BE SURE TO MENTION BEFORE THE GAME: TOUCH IN APPROPRIATE PLACES ONLY! Eleni Kartsimas 02 Spencer Zirkelbach 02 Lindsay Karlin 01 Amy Roesnthal 01 6
Musical Animal Acts Walk/Dance to the best of the music and when the music stops, try to find a chair. The person who does not have a chair to sit in must draw from a hat an animal and act it out for the rest of the sitting members, who must guess the animal. Materials Needed: Chairs (one fewer than the number of people playing,) music, and a hat with about 20 different animals on slips of paper. 1. Set up one fewer chair than the number of freshman in your advisory. 2. Start the music and have the players walk in a circle around the hairs, until you stop the music (like Musical Chairs.) 3. When the music stops, each participant tries to sit in one of the chairs; the player left standing must pull the name of an animal, written on a piece of paper, out of a hat. 4. Then, they must act it out while the other guests try to guess what the animal is. 5. Start the music again and repeat the game until all the animals in the hat have been acted out. 7
Talk It Out To be the last person talking. None. 1. Having two volunteers come up to the front of the class first. 2. The FMP s will give them a scenario. For example, one student might be Santa and the other Mrs. Claus, or Mickey and Minnie Mouse. 3. They have to talk in only questions. 4. Whoever lasts longer stays up a new person takes the other spot. The FMP s can change the scenario depending on how long it s been going on. If a topic is too hard, switch it. By Laura Moschel 09 8
To break the ice in advisory. None needed! What s In Your Milk? 1. Start by asking anyone the question, What s in your milk. 2. That person (Person A) answers with a one word answer, it can be anything at all (i.e. a cow) 3. Everyone takes turns asking Person A any questions they want. 4. Person A must answer a cow (or whatever else there word was) to every question with a straight face. The goal for the people asking the questions is to make Person A crack up or smile. 5. Whoever breaks Person A gets to choose the next person to ask What s in your milk? Make it clear that these questions are supposed to be funny: the more enthusiastic the freshmen are, the more fun the game is. Also, encourage funny answers to the What s in your milk? question. 9
What s My Name Again? Talk to each other and use true and false questions. Enough index cards for the whole class with famous people on them. Clear the desks out of the way. 1. Tape names on the back of every student. 2. Do not let the students know what s on the card. 3. They can ask questions of each other in true/false style to figure out who they are. 4. Once they find out, they can take their seats. You could also use random objects such as watermelon. Sydney May 10
To have teams unify and count to 50. None. Bing Bang Buzz 1. Split up the class into teams of 5. 2. Have each team sit in a circle and each person says a number. 3. Count consecutively but if the number has a 7 in it or is a multiple of 7, the person say BUZZ. Continue counting until a person says the number instead of BUZZ or they reach 50. 4. Once the team reaches 50, add in numbers with 5 s or multiples of 5, this is BANG. If a word has both 5 and 7 in it, then it s BAND- BUZZ. 5. If they reach 50 again, add in 3 s, BING. So if they have a 3 and 7, it s BING-BUZZ, and if it has 3 and 5, it s BING-BANG. And if it has all three, it s BING-BANG-BUZZ. This might take more than one day, because it s very difficult. Amy Rosenthal 02 11
Extreme Hangman Complete 3 hangmen and discover what they have in common. None. 1. Separate the advisory into 2 teams. 2. Make three separate hangman outlines next to each other on the board. 3. Play the three games at the same time. 4. To solve the puzzle, the team must know the answer to all 3 and find the connection among them. 5. There is one point for solving all 3, and one point to find what they have in common. Have topics already prepared. Pop culture is an easy topic to stick to, for example, have 3 movies that all had the same actor in it. Emma Schultz 08 12
Grab A Hand To have fun! One chair for every player of the game. 1. Have all the students sit in co-ed order in a circle of chairs. 2. One boy and one girl will be standing in the middle. 3. All the other students will be sitting in their chairs with their right elbow connected to their knee. (This forces them to be leaning forward a little bit and reachable to the players in the middle.) 4. When the leader says, Go, the two in the middle must run to a person of the opposite gender and grab their hand to pull them to a standing position. They have now just swapped positions. 5. This continues at a fast pace with the constant switching of the person in the middle. 6. When the leader yells, Stop, everyone who is still standing in the middle must remain there and freeze. The leader will then count how many boys or how many girls are standing at that point and if there are more girls, the boys win and vice versa. 7. After each short round, we will ask one more boy and one more girl to come into the middle, along with whomever is still left in the middle, and begin a new round. So each round there should be more and more people in the middle. 13
Hickey Pickey Hokey Pokey Doo Dad To help the freshman remember names in advisory. None needed! 1. Players stand or sit in a circle with one player in the center. The player in the center points his finger at some person and says Hickey pickey hokey pokey doo dad. 2. Before he/she has finished saying this, the player to whom he/she is pointing must call out the name of the player to his right. 3. If he/she does not, he/she becomes IT. In a large group, several people may be in the center. 4. Keep the game moving rapidly! 14
Party Quirks Have fun and get people out of their comfort zone. None. 1. Pick one student to be the host of the party and send them into the hall. 2. Pick three or so students to be guests of the party and the class will give them personalities to play, whether it be Paris Hilton or a security guard whose museum is under attack. 3. Have the host come back in and one by one the guests will come to the party acting in his/her new personality. 4. When the host feels he/she knows who the guests are, they can guess whenever they feel like it. If they re correct, the guest leaves the party. Make the personalities funny, but not impossible to guess. If the host is stumped, have another class member give them a hint. Taryn Nickow 09 15
To break the ice among the freshman. What If? Small pieces of paper, writing utensils. 1. Give each participant a small piece of paper. Ask them to write a What if questions, such as, What if the sky was purple? or What if we all had three arm? 2. When everyone has completed their question (encourage them to work quickly,) ask them to pass their question to the person on their right. Next, each person writes the answer to the question they ve received. They should answer the question as if they had written it. For example, if Tom hands his question ( What if I won the lottery? ) to Susan, she should answer the question as if she had won the lottery, not Tom. 3. When everyone has written their answer, select someone to read ONLY the question they have in front of them. Ask the person to their right to read the ANSWER to their question. They should then read the question on their paper and the person to their right reads the answer, etc. Even though the questions and answers are unrelated, you ll find some hilarious combinations! Make sure everyone participated! If there are no volunteers, select freshmen to get the activity started the more fun it gets, the more freshmen will want to participate. 16
Will You Please, Please Smile? Don t smile! None. 1. Begin with a volunteer, who will walk around the room trying to get people to smile while saying however they like, Honey, if you love me, will you please, please smile? 2. They can do whatever they want to the person to make them smile. 3. The other person must say, Honey, I love you, but I just can t smile, without smiling or laughing. If they do, then they have to find someone else to make smile. Play this later in the year when the students are comfortable with each other. 17