Trust Exercises

We shared another night of interesting games this last week. The kids moved around in large groups to complete a task in five or six different places. Many of the tasks were trust exercises.

Here campers were told to arrange themselves in order from January to December depending on when their birthday was. They could not communicate verbally. No talking. Total silence. Everything was through body language.

The trick: the entire time they needed to keep one foot touching a 2 x 4 on the ground. If they lost touch with the 2 x 4, they had to start over.

This was definitely a challenge they loved. Everyone participated, helping each other. You can see how they used their fingers to communicate the month of their birthday.

Another exercise: they played volleyball using huge beach towels, only the volleyball was a dragon stuffed toy. It was fun to watch. Each team attempted new and different tactics for giving the dragon momentum to make it over the net. There were lots of cheers of success when the task was accomplished.

Yet another exercise: a large square of plastic was placed on the ground and every member of the team was asked to stand on the square. When the team was successful, the square was folded into a smaller square and again they were told to get everyone into the square. It was interesting to see how small the plastic became and how well teams worked together.

I liked the exercise you see here. The team sat on the ground facing each other. Their eyes were closed and they were holding hands. The only two players who had their eyes open were on the far end of the lines. They watched the leader there who flipped a quarter. When the quarter was heads, they squeezed the hand of the person on their team. When the squeeze made it to the other end of the line, that team player quickly grabbed a dragon head (plastic of course). The kids had a huge amount of fun with this one.