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A circle game adapted from "Se Murio Chicho" in Tecnicas Participativas Para La Education Social Vol 1. (The sentence is from a scene in the John Sayles film "Passion Fish" http://youtu.be/hkcIBvJU8Uk)

Good for: fun, expression, loosening up, paying attention to details.

Setup: people sitting in a circle

Number of people: at least three

Materials: none

Time: 30 mins.

Flow:

Like my dad's workshop, this is a collection of tools and materials that I have used over the years. You will find learning activities and games and some reflections on their use but not a method or step by step guide to their use. Most are techniques I have used in my English for Activists and Tokyo Sanitation Workers English courses for Labor Now and classes for Pacific Asia Resource Center and other organizations, as well as undergraduate courses I have taught at Meiji University and Hosei University, in Tokyo.

The idea of this game is to help people develop their ability to make a range of expressions by magnifying and reducing motions and emotions made by others.

Good for: breaking down barriers to expression, observing degrees of expression, developing registers of speech and motion, learning culturally specific forms

Setup: empty space, standing in a circle

Number of people: three at least

Materials: none

Time: 30 mins or so

Flow:

Participants form a circle, standing, and count off.

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

A collection of participatory activities I have used in teaching, both at Meiji University and in my English for Activists courses for Labor Now. All activities were created by Matt Noyes, unless otherwise indicated. All content is under a Creative Commons attribution, share-alike, non-commercial license (see footer). To see activities listed by:
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