Spanglish: August 2019

Monday, August 26, 2019

Scholastic Students Activities

Let´s do some reading

https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/student-activities/

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Wednesday, August 14, 2019

1. Divide your class in two teams.
2. Choose a student of a team and ask him to leave the room
3. His/her team chooses a weird word and each one decide what it is while the student is outside the room
Example:

Agastopia

n. – admiration of a particular part of someone’s body

Studnet A will say: Agastopia is a small city in Africa
Stidennt B will say: No, agastopia is an illness. You start vomiting and .... (trying to convence the student that was outside that he or she has the right definitiion)
Student C will say: No, do not listen to them. Agastopia is an instrument used in a band to make a noise like a small bell.
Student D will say: Nope! Agastopia is an admiration of a particular part of someone´s body.

The outsider student should guess who is saying the truth.

Weird words list:

Agastopia

n. – admiration of a particular part of someone’s body

Bibble

v. – to drink often; to eat and/or drink noisily

Cabotage

n. – coastal navigation; the exclusive right of a country to control the air traffic within its borders

Doodle sack

n. – old English word for bagpipe

Erinaceous

adj. – of, pertaining to, or resembling a hedgehog

Firman

n. – in Turkey and some other Oriental countries, a decree or mandate issued by the sovereign

Gabelle

n. – a tax on salt

Halfpace

n. – a platform of a staircase where the stair turns back in exactly the reverse direction of the lower flight

Impignorate

v. – to pawn or mortgage something

Jentacular

adj. – pertaining to breakfast

Kakorrhaphiophobia

n. – fear of failure

Lamprophony

n. – loudness and clarity of enunciation

Macrosmatic

adj. – having a good sense of smell

Nudiustertian

n. – the day before yesterday

Oxter

n. – outdated word meaning “armpit”

Pauciloquent

adj. – uttering few words; brief in speech

Quire

n. – two dozen sheets of paper

Ratoon

n. – small shoot growing from the root of a plant

Salopettes

n. – high-waisted skiing pants with shoulder straps

Tittynope

n. – a small quantity of something left over

Ulotrichous

adj. – having wooly or crispy hair

Valetudinarian

n. – a sickly or weak person, especially one who is constantly and morbidly concerned with his or her health

Winklepicker

n. – style of shoe or boot in the 1950s with a sharp and long pointed toe

Xertz

v. – to gulp down quickly and greedily

Yarborough

n. – hand of cards containing no card above a nine

Zoanthropy

n. – delusion of a person who believes himself changed into an animal

Icebrakers for kids

https://www.activityvillage.co.uk/ice-breaker-games

Icebraker for big groups

Large Group Ice Breaker Games and Energizers

Do you need some games to get people moving and raise the energy level in the room? Or an activity that helps to break the ice and get participants comfortable with talking to each other. Consider these exercises!

Rock-Paper-Scissors Tournament

This is a fun and loud energizer game based on the well-known “Rock, Paper, Scissor” game. People play against each other in pairs until the first win. But instead of the losing players becoming eliminated from the tournament, they become a fan of the winner, and they cheer for them as the winner plays against a new opponent. You repeat the process until there are only two players left with a huge fan base cheering for them. The last two players have to play until one has won twice. As this activity tends to get loud, it’s best to play it somewhere outside.

Doodling Together

Doodling Together is a fun and creative icebreaker where the group gets to collaboratively draw postcards through a series of instructions as participants complete the postcards started by others. You can simply use this technique in parallel groups as the instructions are easy to follow. It is a great exercise to establish creative confidence, collaborate effortlessly and build capacity for working together as a workshop-group.

Bang!

Bang is a group game, played in a circle, where participants must react quickly or face elimination. One person stands in the middle of the circle as “the sheriff”, pointing at other players who must quickly crouch while those on either side of them quickly “draw”. A good activity to generate laughter in a group. It can also help with name-learning for groups getting to know each other. For events with more than 30 people, it is best to play it in parallel groups.

3 Question Mingle

In this exercise, every participant creates three thoughtful questions that they want to ask from other group members to get to know them better. People start to mingle to ask and answer questions in pairs. After asking a question and listening to the answer, they hand over that question. Thus, in each one-on-one meeting, participants will swap one question each. This allows people to learn interesting facts about each other and works with a group size up to 50-60 people.

Team Building Games for Large Groups

Facilitation techniques and activities to build effective teams and support teamwork. Foster trust and openness for better collaboration and manage team dynamics effectively.

The activities will help you to initiate meaningful conversation in the group, provide a starting a point for focusing on teamwork and collaboration, and importantly give engaging tasks to participants in which they work together. This is essential to increase cohesion within teams. The key for successfully achieving these goals in large groups is to have exercises that can be easily in smaller groups in parallel:

Draw your Coat of Arms

This game helps group members to get to know each other better through a creative drawing exercise: Each participant draws their own coat of arms – a design that is unique to themselves, representing important characteristics, achievements and values of its owner.

If you want to direct the focus of this exercise to certain areas, then you can instruct people to which question to answer in each segment of the Coat of Arms. (E.g. What is something you are very good at? What is something your colleagues don’t know about you?).

When people are finished drawing, they present their work to in their group. The presentation part is practical to do in smaller groups. And whether you have a small or large group, you can arrange a neat Coat of Arms gallery by sticking all the drawings on the wall of the workshop room.

Marshmallow Challenge

In eighteen minutes, teams of 3-5 people must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. Since the instructions are fairly simple, it is easy to scale this activity up to 20-30 groups playing in parallel and competing who builds the highest structure. It emphasizes collaboration, group communication, leadership dynamics and problem-solving strategy.

Helium Stick

The Helium stick activity gives a simple challenge to teams that require teamwork and coordination to manage. People are lined up in two rows facing each other, 5 to 10 people per row, depending on the length of the sticks you have for the game. Participants point with their index finger and hold their arms out in a way that a stick can be horizontally laid on their index fingers.

The task is to lower the stick to the ground while everyone’s index fingers stay in contact with the rod. Why Helium Stick? Often times, the stick will rise first 🙂

You can easily scale this activity for larger groups, just have as many sticks as the number of lines you will create, and the sub-groups will compete against each other who manages to lower their stick first.

Large Group Facilitation Techniques

There are dedicated facilitation methods that work really effectively if you need certain conversations to happen in large groups. The techniques below can be used as core activities for planning and facilitating large group workshops. They tend to have only a few guiding principles and rules, which allows smaller groups to organise and manage themselves during a workshop.

Open Space Technology

Open Space Technology – developed by Harrison Owen – is a method perfectly suited for organizing and running large scale meetings, often multi-day events, where participants self-organize themselves to find solutions for a complex issue. There are only a few rules guiding the structure of the event, and the agenda is created by the people attending. It is a great method for tacking important and complex problems where the solutions are not obvious. The technology can accommodate hundreds of people.

World Café

World Café, developed by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, is a simple yet powerful method to host large group dialogue. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines for the groups of people to discuss different topics at different tables. Participants switch tables periodically and getting introduced to the previous discussion at their new table by a “table host”. The structure of this method enables meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that they find relevant and important.

Conversation Café

While the World Café is a structured process to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas in a large group, the Conversation Café is structured to begin a dialogue regarding a provocative or complex question. So, here the group members do not switch tables, but participate in four rounds of conversation with taking different approaches to exchange opinions and discuss the same topic in depth. The format helps to build trust and connection between group members and therefore well-suited to handle controversial or difficult topics among diverse participants. Again this method is very practical when dealing with large groups by setting up parallel discussion groups.

Idea Generation Methods for Large Groups

The classic – and often ineffective – shout-out type of brainstorming session has a natural limitation when it comes to large groups. However, there are other methods that provide a structured way to get people into creative thinking and elicit innovative ideas from everyone in the room even if you have dozens of participants.

1-2-4-All

This is an idea generation method that is really easy to scale into large groups, yet still allows every participant to actively take part in the process. You split the audience into groups of four, share the challenge or question that people should focus on, then kick off the following sequence of activities in the parallel groups: at first, silent self-reflection by individuals, then generate ideas in pairs, and then share and develop further the ideas in the circle of four people. At the end of the process, the best ideas from each group should be shared with the whole audience. This method allows to leverage the whole group’s intelligence and everyone will be included.

Decision-making Techniques for Large Groups

The following workshop activities will help you to prioritize the most promising ideas with a large group and select up with the best actions and goals to execute.

Dot voting

Dot voting – or ‘dotmocracy’ – is a method for prioritising options and making decisions by a group. Every participant receives a set of colourful sticky dots and they place them next to the ideas they find best – the ideas need to be written on post-its or on a board before the voting starts. There are different variations: you may give multiple dots to people and they can choose how many dots they assign to each option they like. This tools quickly helps to recognise without spending time on discussions, which options are the most popular.

One thing to watch out for is the group bias, though: The more voting dot an option collects during the process, the more appealing it may become to get further votes from the participants who still have to assign their dots. For this reason, it is wise to use dot-voting not as a final instrument to select the best option, but as an indicator of which few options are the most popular.

Closing activities for large groups

These facilitation techniques help to effectively close a large group session. They are simple, time-bound and allow every group member to share their opinion and find the key takeaways after a workshop or event.

One-breath feedback

‘Feedback’ has a quite controversial perception. Have you ever met this situation? Someone is asked to present back after a group session and it gets unfocused. It goes on long it’s off the point and people start losing concentration It’s sometimes known as ‘death by feedback’.

This method helps to maintain attention and forces everyone to stay concise during a closing round with a natural limit: You are only allowed to share your opinion with just one breath – that is usually no longer for 30 seconds for most people. In case you have a large group, it works most effectively if you split up the group to circles of 10-15 participants, in order to keep the feedback round under five minutes.

Feedback Mingle

Feedback Mingle is a great closing activity to generate positive energy in the group. At the end of the session, group members are invited to give feedback to every other member of the group via post-it notes. You can use prompt questions to direct the feedback, such as “What I appreciate the most about you…” and “My challenge to you going forward is…”.

After people finished writing a post-it note to everyone else in the group, invite them to mingle and deliver the feedback to each other. The feedback should always happen one-on-one, shared verbally. If you have larger groups, create smaller groups of people who worked together during the event.

Letter to Myself

You can use this activity at the end of a workshop or training program to inspire future action. Participants write and send a letter to their future self, in relation to how they will apply the insights and learning they got during the course. For instance, you may ask them to focus on a simple question: “What will I achieve by a certain date?”

When explaining the task, tell the group that you will post the cards/letters in X number of months, and that they should take that into account when writing. You can define the timeframe with the group. Since participants reflect individually in this activity, there is no limitation to scale this exercise in larger groups.

Icebrakers for small groups

Icebreakers for Small Groups (2 to 5 people)

The following icebreakers are useful for small groups and teams of about two to five people. In some cases, larger groups can subdivide and play as well. Just because you don’t have a lot of people doesn’t mean you can’t have a great time. Try them out and let us know which ones you think are the most fun!