Telephone

This old-fashioned game works best when it’s started off with a sentence that’s either long or complicated—or both. The kids sit in a circle, and one person starts by whispering the sentence in their neighbor’s ear. That person whispers it on to their neighbor, who passes it along until everyone has had a chance to hear and repeat the sentence.

In the end, the last child can repeat the sentence out loud as they heard it, to see if it transformed along the way. It almost always does!

Story Circles

There are as many ways to build group stories as there are kids on the planet.  When you’ve tried all of these, see if your group can make up a new version that they’ll want to play again and again.  To begin a chain story, one person starts with a conditional sentence (something that starts with the word “if”), such as “If my bike gets a flat, I’ll have to walk.”  The second person picks up the second half of the sentence and adds something of their own, like “If I have to walk, I’ll take my dog.”  Then the third, “If I take my dog, we can get ice cream.”  Keep going until you get bored, or until everyone has had at least two chances to add to the story, then start again with something new.

The second version is faster and works best with spontaneous answers.  This is the one-word story.  The first person starts with one word, for instance “There.”  The second person will say what reasonably follows (one word), followed by the third, and so on.  So it might build like “There” “was” “a” “woman” “who” “wore” “argyle” “underwear.”  Let the story go wherever it wants to and see what your imaginations can do.

A third version involves the phrase “yes and” at the beginning of every sentence.  The first person begins with a sentence, starting a story that’s as wild as possible.  “I decided to become a pirate.”  The second person adds to this with their own sentence, starting with Yes And.  “Yes, and I’ll sail to Madagascar.”  And the third: “Yes, and I’ll buy a koala bear.”  Keep going as long as you can, throwing in the most outrageous, impossible things you can think of that naturally follow the sentence before. This game works best if you avoid negative statements, since those tend to end the story.  Something like “Yes and I couldn’t get back home again,” is hard to follow with anything that’s very fun.  Keep it active, positive, and lively.