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Don’t Just Break the Ice, Shatter It With This Game:

Speedball

This could be a speedball…

Speedball is a fun, active icebreaker game. When played right, it can lead to a terrific finale and a productive debrief. Through the game, participants are encouraged to share creative ideas and work together to accomplish a shared goal. At the same time, the fun element keeps things loose and low pressure, creating a great environment for a new group to start getting to know each other. All you need is something that can be thrown relatively easily; a ball is good, but something a little wacky, like a big stuffed animal or a sleeping bag, can be even better.  In this game, you don’t immediately reveal the final goal.

Check out our piece on icebreaker misconceptions here before you read this!

Setup

  • Arrange everyone standing in a circle around you.
  • Introduce the speedball. Have some fun with the intro, as it helps set the tone for fun and creativity.
  • Explain, “We’ll be playing an awesome game with the speedball. The most important rule is that the speedball doesn’t touch the ground.” Toss it to someone in the circle; he should catch it.
    • This participant will be involved for the rest of the game, so choose wisely. Choose someone who will influence other people to participate, or someone who you’re afraid will quickly wander off if not engaged.
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Speedball1-3.jpg
Or this!
  • Give him a quick round of applause, and ask him to throw it back to you. This time, before you throw it to him, explain that each person, before throwing, should announce their names; announce your name and throw to the same person you threw to the first time.
    • Name is good for an icebreaker. If your group already knows names, use any other question everyone can provide an answer to.
  • Assuming he caught it (and said thank you, of course), instruct him to throw the speedball across the circle to someone else. He should announce his name and toss across. The recipient should catch the speedball, say thank you, announce his own name, and throw it across the circle to someone else.

Oops!

  • At some point, the speedball will inevitably hit the ground. Step in, ask for the speedball back while leading a quick cheer for a good effort, and start again from the first person you threw to. Everyone must throw to the same person they threw to originally!
    • Someone might suggest just passing the ball around the circle. That’s a great idea, but not yet; for now, try to gloss over it. You can also say, “That’s a great idea-we’ll be ready for ideas in a couple of minutes!”

Sharing Ideas, Working Together, Succeeding Together

  • Your first goal is for everyone to receive the speedball and for it to get back to you. After that, you will challenge them to get their time as low as possible. If the first round is done in 3 minutes, challenge them to get it to a minute and a half, then below a minute, then 40 seconds, 20, 10, 5, etc. Each time, you’re presenting a new challenge. First, congratulate them on reaching the previous goal, and suggest: “What do you say about x seconds!”
  • The group will have to adapt its strategy either due to the time pressure or people having trouble catching the speedball. Either way, you’re looking for participants to suggest ideas that will speed up and streamline each round. In the beginning, you’ll likely have to draw attention to suggestions; towards the end, try to step out and encourage them to suggest and attempt new ideas on their own. Stay involved by starting each new round, so you can continue celebrating with them.

You Did It!

  • If the group allows for it, you will often end up squished together with everyone touching the speedball, and everyone shouting their names on a count of 3; you can call that finishing in under 1 second! Celebrate and cheer!

Check out our posts on running a post-activity debrief: Part 1 and Part 2

Fire + Meat + HaKotel + All-Night Tiyul = …

A Night to Remember

“Are you sure you’re in the right place?” the taxi driver asked me. I was sure; I was expecting something off the beaten path, and my destination certainly fit the bill. With a dubious goodbye, he sped off, and I set off for the headlamps and bonfire in the distance. It was late Thursday night during Bein HaZmanim, and I was running a teambuilding activity for Yeshivat HaKotel. They were just finishing up an all-you-can-eat barbecue of hot dogs, hamburgers, wings, and sausages (fat spicy hot dogs), and spirits were high despite the late hour. After my slot, the students would be embarking on an all-night hike of the Burma Road, learning about it’s role in breaking the siege on Yerushalayim in 1948. They’d be finishing with a Neitz Minyan back in HaKotel.

Teambuilding with Yagilu

Yagilu runs teambuilding workshops all the time. We’ve worked with schools and shuls, huge organizations and individual families; each experience is fun and unique. A typical workshop will include a mix of group games and challenges that pit the group against a specific goal. While working together to accomplish that goal, participants have the opportunity, with our guidance, to practice a host of skills:

  • Communication
  • Creativity
  • Positive Attitude
  • Self-Control
  • Dedication and Perseverance
  • Leadership and ‘Followership’

I’ve watched students and campers transform over the course of a single game. Once, we were playing one of our opening get-to-know-you games that takes some out-of-the-box thinking to really succeed in. A quiet student hiding behind some other members of the class approached me during the game and suggested an idea to help the class succeed. I encouraged him to share it with his classmates, which was hard for him. He did it, and I immediately pointed out positive feedback from the class when they tried his idea and it worked. He responded with another idea, and another, and another – and finished off the game leading and directing his peers to an incredible success! I love being a part of experiences like that.

Game Time

My goal for the night was to facilitate relationships. These guys had just arrived in Yeshiva a month ago and gotten straight into a a full-day learning schedule. The month gets more and more intense, finally culminating in and awe-inspiring Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur opposite Har HaBayis. This program was an opportunity for the guys to relax and get to know their fellow students in a positive, fun setting. Our first game was Speedball, a classic everyone remembers from camp. However, I had never played it in the dark, with just one headlamp…how would the guys adapt? You can tell a lot about people based on the way they respond to setbacks, encourage their friends, and tackle hard challenges. I watched in amazement as the HaKotel students worked their way up, succeeding again and again. Each time another issue popped up, the group laughed it off, listened to suggestions as to how to solve it, and tried again. At the end, they even kept posing new goals for themselves, trying to get their fastest time lower and lower!

Do you see the Tower of Feetsa?

After such a great first game, I was excited for the next: The Leaning Tower of Feetsa. The instructions for the game are just a single line; the challenge of the game is just as mental as it is physical. Again, the group was more than up to the challenge, trying different strategies as they thought farther and farther ‘outside the box.’ I was able to watch as boys from London, New York, and Canada (and more!) worked together to succeed in the games we played.

Success!

We finished off the session with a couple of high-energy group games, some singing around the bonfire, and an epic camp story. While the guys were clamoring for more, I had to get back home, and they had to start on their night hike. I walked away so impressed with the positivity and engagement from the Hakotel students. While I’ve run these activities many times before, this group was special – they needed no coaxing or encouragement to rise to the challenge and try to succeed as a team. It was an awesome night of great food, lots of fun, and the beginnings of many strong relationships, and I’m happy I was able to be a part of it.

Experiencing Values vs. Teaching Them

An article by Tani Prero was published by The Lookstein Center for Jewish Education. The full article can be read here. Learn more about Team Building with Tani here.

In addition, the full text of the article is below.

Experiencing Values vs. Teaching Them

Anyone connected to children or the field of education today knows that our educators and our children face many challenges. With bullying and other inappropriate or problematic behavior, a major goal today is helping children treat themselves and others with respect. We have an ideal for them, and we have the challenge of teaching our kids good “midos.”

Kids learn a lot from modelling. They absorb attitudes and behaviors from their parents, TV, movies, music videos, and from teachers. In today’s snarky culture, behaving with respect towards others isn’t cool.

If this is how many kids perceive interacting with others, how do we teach respect and good midos? How can they ever see these ideals as valuable?

In my experience, it is not effective to teach about respect or good midos in the manner we might teach about a holiday or historical event. To develop a child’s understanding that respect is morally good and even an obligation, the student needs to experience it. There is, of course, a disconnect here; if a student doesn’t already behave this way, how can he learn?

In terms of adopting values, one of the strongest influences on a child is the peer group. When a teacher promotes a particular value, the peer group ultimately decides whether or not to accept it. Even if a few “good” kids agree, if the majority of the class does not accept the value, it will often not be adopted by the others. Even if some kids adopt the value, the majority will pressure (by ridicule or other means) them so they eventually behave like the rest of the group. Of course, there are exceptions, but this is how the model often works. In terms of adopting values, peers matter most.

The Charlie Brown cartoons illustrate this brilliantly. The author, Charles Schultz, appears to depicts this very point. In the world of Charlie Brown we see no adults, only their legs, and when adults speak the only sounds heard are “blah, wah, blah….”

And so, if we want to make sure kids hear more than “blah, wah, blah,” we need to be cognizant that it is the individual kid or their peers who will be the most effective in teaching the values and behaviors we want them to learn and adopt. As educators we need to infiltrate the peer group and its values and bring them to actually experience the benefits of respect. Once they experience the benefits of respect, they can decide as a group to adopt the value, and will have learned how to do that in the process.

We can begin by presenting kids with a situation that evokes feelings of mild tension or interpersonal stress. The leader / facilitator must stand ready to ensure that the tension doesn’t boil over into a conflict. He should also prepare to guide the students through resolving the tension.

The facilitator will often need to step in and guide the children though the process of communication and coordination, while ensuring the activity remains fun and engaging. If the children have any hopes of succeeding at the task and winning the game, they will need to work together. To that end, they can only convince each other to work together when they speak respectfully to each other. As the children talk to each other politely, they see that they succeed together. Through this experience of success, they learn that it helps them to speak respectfully.

Directives aren’t a tool that works here. We can’t tell a child to act a certain way. We are looking to help the children choose to utilize a certain behavior. They will apply this behavior when they see that it benefits them. A teacher can explain a behavior and even give examples, such as what a respectful invitation might sound like, or to even spell out in greater detail how they might say it. In this method the teacher/facilitator presents the students with tools they can choose to use or ignore. The choice remains theirs.

An example of this is one of my favorite games called The Reverse Relay Race. The goal is to have a team run together while everyone holds onto one object. It sounds simple, but thankfully creates many challenges. Some kids in the group can run faster than others, others are great at telling others what to do and others don’t know how to take directions. Add the race element and these challenges become more intense. Quite quickly all sorts of tensions arise. Identifying and processing the interactions transforms them into a fantastic learning experience.

Any challenge in itself can and should be enough to motivate the team, if it arouses their curiosity. As long as the students will perceive the game as ‘cool,’ they will have the motivation to play and learn.

So asking thought provoking questions such as “I see you’re in a predicament. The way you are yelling at Shlomo to help you doesn’t seem to be working. How could you speak to him in a way that will get him to want to help your team?”

Why will motivate the children to try to learn this new behavior? Once they appreciate the challenge they want to win. Additionally, when one of them stands in front of peers as an appointed leader, he will feel pressure to perform and thus receive more peer approval. Here students discover that winning does not mean competition. In our case, cooperation will bring victory.

Another experience guiding students towards more cooperative behavior arose in a session that focused on leadership. In this scenario, the boy who volunteered to be leader made fun of a boy who made a mistake. I explained to the student that the definition of a leader is someone who helps his followers succeed. “When a leader makes fun of his followers does it make them more able to succeed, or less?” The leader thought for a moment. I pushed further with the question, “How else could a leader respond to the mistake of a follower – in a way that will help him succeed?” After that prompt, the boy figured out instantaneously on his own how to speak respectfully to his friend who had made a mistake. The follower smiled brightly at the polite and respectful invitation to join in the game and then he joined in to help.

When the child chooses respectful behavior, sees a positive result, and enjoyed the good feeling, he will want to use that behavior again. Furthermore, those around him will buy in too, since he was the successful leader.

As with any learned behavior, repeated exposure and guidance are necessary to turn into a habit. This is possible, and ultimately, this is a great way for kids to learn to respect!

As we described earlier, children learn from what they see and experience around them. Furthermore the peer group is a powerful force affecting their thoughts and behavior at this stage. Combining these strong influences, with support and guidance from educational professionals, create a valuable process towards an engaging and educational experience.