Today we’re gonna unpack how we can make learning fun for students and in this video, I’m gonna share 2 of my favorite activities that are extremely quick and extremely simple to lead that are both fun to do but even deeper than that, there are 2 activities that help reframe the mindset from learning as they “have to do” or a task to a “get to do” or “can do.” If you stick around to the end of the video, you’ll have 2 really awesome activities in your toolbox as well as a really good way to help students shift their mindset from the same old, same old to creating something new that’s a little bit fun and exciting. I’m quite thrilled to be taking what is in my brain and tossing it into your brain. I get to work with some of the coolest educators and organizations all around the world helping them make connection and engagement really easy and I’ve learned a ton through failure and I’ve tried more activities than you could count and I’ve kept some of the best ones. In fact, I actually… hold on. I actually was cleaning my little office studio earlier today and found this little red notebook which is I used to call my brain. When I was learning all of these exercises, I was teaching a team leadership development course at Penn State University. I was recording just in pencil, old school pencil, all the activities that I picked up along the way to help make learning a little bit more fun, a little bit more experiential, a little bit more engaging.
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There’s a whole list. The channel is filled with them so, if this is your first time here, I think on YouTube somebody told me that you can subscribe to a channel and if you click like on the video, it actually shows it to more. Still learning, all right, enough of me setting up “squiggle bird” and “touch blue,” the 2 activities I’m gonna share with you today are coming your way.
Really quick the this video is titled “How Can We Make Learning Fun For Students” and I want to just unpack 2 types of fun real quick. In the experiential and adventure learning field, there is an acronym that goes F-U-N-N. FUNN. Functional, understanding, not necessary. That’s one framing of fun. It’s like we just do this because purely for the joy of doing it. We don’t need a good reason. It’s just fun. There’s not a functional understanding necessary.
The inspiration for this video actually came from a question that I got through our website from James and I’m going to just read off his question because I think setting the context for what I’m going to be sharing might help you because “fun” might mean something different depending on what kind of students you’re actually working with. James’s question, just to set the scene a little bit, James wrote in and said, “Hey, so I’ve just accepted an amazing role as a chief facilitator for Discover Stem which is this cool innovation lab for gifted and intelligent students.” Audience here, gifted and talented students. “My role is to run the program which involves presentations and modules to effectively open up the students creative and innovative side of their personality. I’ve watched any envied your videos, I would love to talk about goals and some advice from you and how to best facilitate that.” This is kind of cool because even though James and I didn’t have the bandwidth to meet, I took this question and said, “Oh, this should become a video. Let’s share it with the world. Thanks for your curiosity.” That applies to you too, with all of my videos, if you’ve got something you’re curious about, you want to know more about or you missed a step or whatever it is, drop a question in the comments and quite often I actually pull those comments and turn them into videos. Pull those questions and turn them into videos and so you’ll notice that the vast majority of the videos that I share here are actual questions that somebody has typed in and asked in some capacity or opened up their mouth and asked in some capacity. All right, gonna bring in my iPad here and let’s zoom in on “squiggle bird.” I’m gonna take you to where I learned this activity which was in Portland, Oregon. An organization called X-plane and the author of the book “Game storming” founded X-plane. This exercise is so darn simple. We actually did this exercise in their offices. All you need is a piece of paper.
It works fantastically in a virtual or remote learning context as well as an in-person context. To show you this activity, I’m actually just going to facilitate it or give the instructions as if I was giving them to a group of students so you can peel and adapt it. Obviously, you’re going to want to ruthlessly reinterpret how I frame this up and apply it to your own concept or content and your own context of who your students are, what will resonate with them etc. The framing for this really matters because without any framing, most activities are dumb, right. Most activities are kind of stupid without proper situational context. I would probably do this toward the beginning of a class or a workshop or whatever else so just kicking off, I might say, “Hey y’all. Welcome! We’re gonna just kick off right away with a little exercise but first, 2 questions. How many of you identify as artistic or you’re creative? How many of you identify as artistic or creative?”
You look at the number hands. “Okay, hands down. How many of you would say that you’re masters of drawing? You can draw really really well.” Show of hands there. “All right, we’re gonna do this exercise. It’s gonna be very short the exercise has 2 words in the title. I’m only gonna give you the 1st word right now and then we’ll unpack the 2nd in a moment.
The 1st word is squiggle. Super simple, all I want you to do is grab a notepad, sticky note, whatever piece of paper. This works, by the way, this works extremely well virtually and in person. “Grab your paper, grab your pencil, electronic or otherwise, and draw 4 squiggles. That’s it. They can be any kind of squiggles you want. I’m gonna go with a spiral, a little bit of a boxy something on the other and erratic and maybe just a little tiny squiggle over here. All right so, you’ve drawn 4 squiggles, you’ve got 30 seconds to do that.” Give the group 30 seconds to do that. “The 2nd word in this activity is bird. Squiggle bird. Now what I want you to do is transform your 4 squiggles into 4 different birds. The only caveat is that you can only add 4 things. You can only add 4 features. You can only add a beak, eyes, a tail and feet. Beak, eyes, tail and feet. That is it. That is all you have to make these birds. I’m gonna play a song, ready, set, go.” I’m just going to do this quickly for you now so that you can see an example but I might add a beak here, by the way, I would not identify myself as artistic so here we go, I can’t even believe I’m putting this on the internet. A couple squiggles there and an eye just to bring it home. Wow, that’s basic. That bird kind of looks like he’s pooping out a rectangle. Okay, 2nd one, we’re gonna go open beak, oh my goodness, keep with the square feature. We’re gonna have a square eye, this is one of his feet right here so I’m just gonna go add another foot out there. Oh, look at that, oh my gosh and a tail. Maybe we’ll go kind of crazier out the back. Look at that. All right, all right. I’m feeling that laying down. Okay, let’s do beak here. This guy’s gonna have a big old eye right here and let’s do this kind of pelicans status, I don’t know. All right. All right, I could do it. This guy’s only got 1 leg, no, 2 legs that are joined from only 3 toes, I don’t know. This one, you know, the obvious answer would be to go like this, right. It looks like a head but we’re not gonna go obvious right now. We are going to go that is oh my goodness. That is just 1 of 2 very intensely clawed feet and the beak… This guy is going to be mostly beak actually and eyes… Spur’s not really gonna have a body, I guess, and then a tail out here like this. Oh my goodness, this is slightly terrifying. There you go. Boom. You get the idea, right. As I’m going here, the goal is to turn these 5 creatures into a bird. Now, this is an awesome time to either… if somebody drew this on notecards or papers or notebooks to pass around and just ask the question, “Can you identify how many on people’s page, how many can you identify as a bird?” People will laugh as that goes around. Maybe especially as they see this guy.
This is just I’m… I’m a little ashamed to be posting this on the internet actually. You get the idea. This reframing of even if someone identifies as not being able to draw, which I would argue is very much a same old, same old narrative, at some point they picked up that story and the story kept repeating in the same way that I am not good at math and that story got embedded and repeated and repeated and repeated. It’s just the same, old, boring story. As soon as you take a squiggle and you’ve got a bunch of people in the room that don’t identify as artistic and don’t think they can draw and you give them some parameters, specifically 4 parameters. Beak, eyes, feet and a tail, all of a sudden, they have some direction to move toward being artistic or creative. I used to work with a creativity innovation professor at Penn State University. His name’s Sam Hunter and one of things I learned from him and have since learned from some of my clients, some of the most innovative organizations and schools on the planet, is that restraints often create creativity or restraints promote creativity. Squiggle bird, this idea is if you just said to a group of people that does not identify as artistic or real as really phenomenal drawing people, if you ask them to draw a bird, that’s either gonna be really overwhelming, not funny, very basic, right. Poor drawings, whatever it is, right. But, when you give them some parameters, you draw things that you would never otherwise create, right. I would never draw this if someone told me to draw a bird. I would only draw it if somebody told me to create a squiggle and then add these 4 elements and make it a bird. That’s activity number 1, squiggle bird.
I told you it was super short and easy. Hopefully, you can, you know… the best activities I think are fitted to your framework so make this fun and silly and creative or serious and rooted in lesson. Whatever you want, adapt this to your context so that it fits. At the very, very least, it’s a great just opening warm up, energizer, exercise to do with a group of students of all ages from adult students down to elementary school students.
All right, activity number 2, touch blue. This is almost certainly the simplest activity that you could possibly create on the planet and yet the way that I learned it was facilitating a team development program for 200 college students out in the woods at this leadership development center outside of Penn State University where
I used to teach. You picture 2 or more college students here, they got some pent up energy and moving around, you know, whatever call whatever. College students are like… they’re all mostly freshmen and sophomores. And the activity my mentor, Rod, taught me this. I’m sure that it came from somewhere else. I don’t know the original source of it but very simply touch blue is touch blue. Go find something that is blue and touch it. 200 people. When I say “touch blue,” somebody goes and finds something blue. That’s only part one of the exercise The idea is that everyone touches blue and as soon as everyone has done that or is doing that, anybody from the group can yell out, either unmute or just yell out, whatever the 2nd activity is going to be. You could say “touch blue,” you could be really unoriginal and say “touch green” or you could also say “jump.”
Somebody says “jump” and the crowd all of a sudden you’ve got 200 people that are now jumping and then all of a sudden somebody says “crouch” and you’re way down here, just crouching, hanging out, right. You let this go as long as the party is fun. My philosophy is always end the party while it is still fun. I think it was my mom’s philosophy too growing up is end the party while it’s still fun, leave the party while it’s still fun. This activity could totally burn out after like 3 to 4 minutes, depending on the group. And I’ve had it go as long as 15 and it was basically like this group exercise where you’re sweating at the end because of all things. When you do this ,it really crowdsources the option and the choice for fun to your students. This is what I love, and obviously you need to be mindful of who you do this with. I might not do this with every group of students but a group of gifted, really smart, talented students, this might be a way to invite them to stretch outside of where they’re comfortable, right. There’s a little bit of psychological safety required or a little bit of psychological risk required to call out and invite everybody to do something. You know, there’s the evaluation component of creativity and innovation is when I share this, will people do what I say? Will they like it? Will they like me, right?
If you’re trying to bring out the creative and innovative side of somebody’s personality and make learning fun for them, sometimes the best person to help facilitate that is the student. It’s not you, right. As educators, as teachers, we often cannot predict what is fun for somebody else. Now, the framing that I might offer or edit for touch blue… and by the way I don’t give them a list of prompts. I might give them a couple examples to get them started but then I’d let the group go. Now, 1 rule that I forgot to share is when you’re doing touch blue, the group has to continue doing whatever the previous activity was until somebody else calls out something new. And so, if no one calls out anything and somebody said jump before, the group is just going to be jumping and jumping and jumping and jumping. And so, just an added element there. It creates a little bit of social pressure to keep the activity moving along because somebody doesn’t want to jump for a while and inevitably somebody will even yell out stop and everybody just freezes and then somebody else out something else. It’s a great thing to do for 120 seconds on Zoom or some other digital video conference platform as well. If you’re in a hybrid learning context as well. Now, touch blue is going to segue me into this larger mindset shift. I think that both squiggle bird and touch blue help accomplish this and I would say that the bridge from going from same old, same old to creating new is living somewhere right in here in the middle, right. The bridge between these 2 is doing something new, right. If you’re taking the same path to work every single day, you can’t get to here unless you actually do something new, unless you abandon your GPS and take a new route. I think that we could also replace this with “create fun” as well. The brain loves novelty. We seek, new and fresh ideas. New and fresh experiences and we actually get a little dopamine, serotonin dump in the brain when we experience that novelty. Inviting just fresh, new, really breaking out of the mold of what you are typically used to doing in your learning context will make huge stride in making learning fun for your students. If you made it to this point in the video and you haven’t subscribed, what’s up with that? Also feel free… we’ve got a bunch of free printable card decks and activity resources in the link in the description.
Feel free to check that out and mine those resources. We also have the actual card decks and things available to get shipped to you as well. You can check out those links below as well. I’m Chad Littlefield, it was lovely hanging out in cyberspace with you. Have an awesome day.