Activities whose main function is to get people to loosen up, to communicate with each other freely, to relax, to get excited or enthusiastic. Most often they are games, but they can also have thematic content.
This activity, based a children's song by Eric Herman and the Invisible Band, is a word game in which participants take one thing and describe it in terms of another (see also the surrealist game "L'un dans l'autre" (the one in the other) in A Book of Surrealist Games).
The idea of this circle game is to take an object and then re-imagine it as a series of different objects. I took this from a children's game I learned from Robyn Avalon when visiting with her family in Santa Fe. Kids love it.
Good for: loosening up, for using language naturally, in a fun and creative way that people at different levels can understand and enjoy.
Set up: chairs in a circle (could also do it standing)
Number of people: at least three
Materials: some simple object
Time: 30 minutes or so
Popular education has been described as a "pedagogy of the question." (Bruss, Neal, Macedo, Donaldo P. Toward a Pedagogy of the Question: Conversations with Paulo Freire. Journal of Education, v167 n2 p7-21 1985) That's especially true of the starting point.
