Sticks and Stones Construction for Group Development

This activity can be a great addition to learning how to read a map or used as a separate initiative. It focuses on the group’s ability to communicate and listen to one another. It uses their problem solving, leadership, and visual-spatial skills. As with any teamwork activity, it has opportunity for many different messages and metaphors. An important one that this could convey well is judging the proportion of different events and their impact on your life. Although slightly complex to set up, I think the activity can push the abilities of the group and help frame conversations like talking about proportional reactions to different events.

Objective: For each person to find their stick and bring it back to the start.

• Each person memorizes and learns their stick.
• Then, collect them all and hide them within the playing area.
• They can be just dispersed, laying on the ground or hidden amongst other sticks/ things.
• Set each participant to find their stick.

Additions & Alternatives:

• The sticks can be any objects, as long as they aren’t too unique or will stand out. Participants should have to search to find their object.
• Have participants carve or mark their sticks to make them more personal and easier to identify so everyone gets their own.
• Especially if you are hiding objects that have special significance or meaning, you might join the group so they may hide you object and your searching with them.

This activity can be fun and informative about the history of different patterns and the usage of weaving to build baskets. It also has good potential for a metaphor as each piece of material can represent something unique. For example, if you have three different length pieces then each length is a different size goal. So, lets say they choose 3 short, 2 medium, and 3 long pieces. The participant would assign a specific goal to each piece, matching the size of the goal with the length of the piece. they would then braided it into a circle creating their circle of goals. Each singular goal/ length piece is supporting it neighbors and is in turn held together by the others. This is just one way you can add a metaphor to the activity. There are plenty of ways you can alter the activity to increase the depth of the group’s discussion. Regardless of whether this is deep and meaningful or lighthearted and fun, the participants get to learn a new skill and practice existing ones.

This is another game that focuses on teamwork and communication skills. I anticipate the group having conflicting ideas about how to complete the task and how to best use the resources they collected or are given. This can be an energizer for completing a group puzzle or initiative about helping one another reach a common goal.

Additions & Alternatives:

• This can be done with sticks, leaves, and dirt but the picture needs to be constructed on something transportable in order to combine all the pictures. Creating it on a pad or jacket that could slide to the map would potentially work.
• If there are common themes in different pictures, try rearranging the map to connect the similar themes.
• Maybe participants can choose if it is a river or a roadway that connects to the next picture, then try to assemble the map so all the pictures fit together and rivers match up with rivers, and roads with roads.
• If using paper, you can pre-label each sheet to correspond with a specific spot in the map. Then, let participants randomly choose their piece of paper. Afterwards, rebuild the map according to the labels and see what it has become.
• Make it a living map that gets updated throughout the program.