Exercises for Kids
Training Exercises and Resources

This is a team building exercise suitable for all ages and both the academic and professional world. The aim is to get a number of teams to work together on a common task and understand the importance of working towards a particular target. You can easily customise the exercise to explore a variety of concepts on management and teamwork.

The main task in this exercise involves creating a menu for a particular event. Groups get to create, share and defend their choices which allow you to explore topics such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving, goal setting, cooperation, negotiation and persuasion.

This is a simple but fun team building exercise most suitable for outdoors. This exercise can also be a fun activity for kids. You can run competitively and give a prize to the winner. It helps to train people to stay focused while being totally aware of their environment as the dynamic changes. The winner must be good at predicting what others are going to do while keeping them guessing on he would do.

At the end of each training session, it is ideal to test delegate’s knowledge about the topics covered during the session. You can make the process more entertaining by making the test feel like a game. You can apply the questioning format presented here to test delegates’ knowledge about a given topic. The only requirement is that you need to prepare a number of questions before the course.

This is an exercise similar to the popular team building exercise on handling toxic waste. The major difference here is that participants need to handle a glass of water and don’t spill it while carrying it from one location to another.

The exercise is ideal for teamwork, leadership and resource management. The competitive atmosphere leads to rapid decision making, activity coordination, and novel ways to compromise and get the task done.

This fun activity is suitable as an ice breaker. This is a simple randomisation exercise that you can use to get a group of people answer a number of random questions. You will need to write these questions on a football before the course. As each delegate receives the ball he should randomly answer a question based on the setup described here.

Since you have total control over the questions, you can bias the exercise based on your needs. You can use it as an icebreaker with generic questions about delegates. You can also use this for recap to cover what has been discussed in a particular session by asking delegates to answer related questions. You can also use this method as a test.

In this team building exercise, delegates learn to work together to complete a seemingly simple task. However, teams can always get better results if they plan ahead, assign leaders, coordinate their activities and generally think of ways to optimise their workflow. You can teach about many teamwork skills in the context of this exercise.

This is a fantastic exercise in getting a group practice working together, coordinating their activities and learning to work more efficiently. Delegates must review their performance and think of better strategies in problem solving.

As an analogy this exercise can be thought of as a production team tasked to produce a gadget where the efficiency of the team leads to better production rates. The team must think of ways to improve the production rate and workflow. They must think of strategies that can be implemented easily in practice and improved on. The exercise requires teamwork, leadership, communication skills and the ability of each team to get the best from every individual.

Storytelling and the ability to develop a character is an important part of a child’s development. This exercise helps kids telling a story without worrying about not knowing where to start.

Here, you provide a set of random characters so each person has a doll, a puppet or an action figure in his hands. The story is then primed based on what they have got. It will also make it easier for them to develop the story when they have a physical representation of the character in their hands. Kids also get to practice puppeteering while going through their storytelling which further immerses them in the story and engages more of their senses.

This exercise helps delegates work together to create a sculpture out of clay. It is ideal for classes on ceramics hand building with clay but it can also be used for a fun team building activity.

This is also a very useful exercise for creativity as it is relatively fast paced. Delegates have little time to get carried away with too much detail on any specific work and so are forced to express their creativity in a focused and meaningful way.

You can use this at the beginning of a multi-day class on making sculptures to break the ice and get people to become more comfortable with each other.

In this exercise, delegates contribute to each other’s design sequentially and everyone participates in the creation of all sculptures.

Knowing how to communicate well with others is an essential skill.

Here, you will be introduced to several communication skills exercises suitable for kids and young adults. The way you run these exercises highly depends on the age of your audience so you will need to adjust them as necessary.