Activity Name: Team Draw
Time Required: 15-20 minutes
Ages: 8 and up
Introduction: This activity will help your family practice relying on one another and exercise team work as they participate in a fun, high energy team based activity.
What you need:
• 1 whiteboard, flip chart, or big piece of paper
• 1 marker
• Several slips of paper with drawing prompts (see list below)
• Container for slips of paper
Instructions:
Before the activity, print and cut out the slips of paper with the drawing prompts, fold them in half, and place them in the container. Explain that there are two jobs in this game: the drawers and the guessers. Everyone will get to be both at some point in the game. The goal of the guesser is to guess what their team is drawing.
What makes this activity different than regular Pictionary is that the drawers are taking turns drawing a segment of the picture. (For example, one student would draw the rabbit’s ear, the other might draw its nose, etc.). The drawers each get a three-second turn at the whiteboard or paper before they have to hand their marker to the next drawer.
If you have enough participants, assign one family member to be a referee in each round and count out loud to three for each drawer’s turn: “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand,” at which point the drawer hands the marker to the next drawer to continue the picture. During each drawer’s three seconds, the marker must not be lifted from the whiteboard or flip chart, and there is to be no talking between the drawers.
As the drawers are drawing, the guesser will be calling out his/her guesses. Count how many turns the drawers had to take before the guesser guessed the correct answer, then rotate jobs and see if the next guesser can improve on that time. Before beginning, the drawers will assemble and pick a slip of paper out of the container and all take a turn to silently read the drawing prompt. Have the drawers return to their whiteboard or paper and say “Go!”
With enough people, this activity can also be done with two teams competing against each other for the fastest guessing time.
Discuss:
• Was there anything about this activity that was frustrating to you? What was it and why?
• How did we all depend on each other to be good at this activity?
• In what ways do we depend on each other in our family?
• When someone is depending on you, how can that make you work harder during a hard time?
• Have you ever thought about someone depending on you as a way to get through a hard time? This is called Relational Resilience.