Teaching Activities for Families

Objective:

To create an ice-breaking opportunity.
To ensure that all participants will get involved.
To encourage participants to develop good questioning and data-gathering/detective skills.

Procedure:

Brainstorm a list of famous people (and/or creatures, such as Mickey Mouse, Superman, or E.T.) sufficient to cover the number of expected participants. Celebrities might include famous singers, actors/actresses, politicians, business people, writers, musicians, etc. Names may be drawn from a variety of fields, or may all have a common thread connecting them. (Examples are: celebrities related to the nature of the group; all names starting with the same letter; or all people who were popular during a particular era.) In addition, if you personally know the participants in advance, you might decide to match the assignment of celebrity names to individuals who have a similar characteristic.

Write these names on stick-on or pin-on name tags.

When participants arrive (e.g., during a social hour or preconference coffee time), present them with their task (to identify who their celebrity is) by asking questions that can be answered “Yes” or “no” of other participants. Then fasten a name tag to their back and encourage them to mill around with other participants.

Discussion Questions:

What kinds of questions were most useful in identifying who your celebrity was?

Were non-verbal cues helpful in solving your task? Explain.

What did you learn about each other through this exercise?

Materials Required:

Name tags.

Approximate Time Required:

15-30 minutes, depending on size of group, physical space for movement, familiarity of participants with celebrity names, etc.