The beginning of the preschool or school year, the arrival of new people within our groups or classes. It usually involves introducing your name and saying a few words about yourself, your interests or favorite activities. It’s hard to remember this information, especially when a dozen people are telling you about them. How can we turn greeting into a game that will help children get acquainted?
Here is our suggestion!
Each child is given three to five A5 or A6 sized pieces of paper. On each one, the student can draw (or write, if the game is for older children) something he or she would like to tell others about themselves. This can be information like: I like to eat strawberry ice cream, my favorite toy is a red car, I have a dog named Burek. One card can tell about only one such thing.
When the students finish their work, one by one they present it in front of the rest of the class. It is worth pointing out that they should try to remember information about others, and that they can ask the person additional questions.
When they have finished introducing themselves, we make a hole in each card and hand out strings (they can be different colors) for the children to thread their cards. Tip: it’s a good idea to make a knot in front of each picture, so that the cards don’t slide one on top of the other. We collect all the resulting strings.
Now it’s time for a break and other activities, such as the Knowla Box game. We can complete the greeting game the same day or the next day.
If we want to use Knowla Box, the activity “Avatar of feelings” (Planet EMO) will be ideal. Each child creates his or her own avatar, which also allows you to show the diversity of people in the group, and on the other hand – talk about common traits. You can also use the activity “Connect the dots” (Planet SEN), from which you can make an introduction to untangling strings.
The next step is to create a spider web from the collected strings with pictures. They should pass between each other, but not be too tangled. We can use chairs arranged in a circle or a cork board to make such a web. This is the so-called web of our group.
The children’s task is to go after more strings and match them to one of the people in our group. When we manage to correctly assign a card to a person, we hand them a string. Finally, we can hang sets of strings with their names in a prominent place in the room.
There are several other possibilities for this game, e.g.: you can untangle the web that will bind our group together, while showing that everyone is an integral part of it. We can involve students in braiding the spider web – the untangled string is not given to the person who created it, but to the person who first guessed who it belongs to – the winner is the one who will have the most at the end of the untangling.
