Team-building Games

On January 15, 2020, students participating in the CLE’s Buddy Scheme joined the International Tutors for some Team-building Games in the Arthur Samy Language Learning Center (ASLLC). As it was the first buddy scheme event since the orientation, the main aims were to break the ice and get familiar with each other. And what better way to do that than playing some fun team-building games together?

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In the first game, Name Alliteration, buddies had to stand in a circle. The first person stated their name and something they liked that started with same letter (e.g. Danny and dancing), and the next person then had to state not only their own name and what they liked but also repeat all the previous information. As a challenge of memorization, Name Alliteration worked well in helping everyone learn the names of each other.

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Using Story Cubes – dice with pictures instead of dots -- buddies then shared interesting stories and facts about themselves by choosing dice and explaining how they represented their identities, strengths, and goals. This chained into a series of group photos based on the pictures on the dice. Together with Body Writing, a game where students used their own bodies as letters to write words such as FRIENDS and TRUST, the Group Photo Challenge provided our photographer with excellent photo opportunities.

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Next, two games played with the theme of coping with limited vision. In one, buddies had to skillfully untangle the Human Knot they had created by blindly grabbing each other’s hands. In the other, Blind Drawing, they paired up to explain to each other how to draw pictures that their partners could not see. Both activities trained their ability to think from someone else’s perspective.

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Finally, the buddies also played two kinds of Charades, where speech was limited rather than vision. The first was the classic version where someone has to explain a word or phrase without speaking. The second, Telephone Charades, required the buddies to teach a gesture to each other in a long chain, inevitably changing it along the way due to misunderstandings and leading to perhaps the loudest laughter during the whole two-hour evening.

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All in all, the Team-building Games were a fun and fruitful way to start the 2019/2020 season of buddy activities. The International Tutors would like to thank the buddies who joined and look forward to hosting more events in the upcoming months.

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