One of the challenges of working with any group of children or youth is that it's often hard to help them get to know each other. We had a fun friend-shipping activity that really helped break the ice a little and helped the girls see that they had lots of common ground and really did like each other!
We started by setting up the room to have two rows of chairs facing each other. Small jars of questions were placed spaced out between the rows. The questions were simple get to know you questions like "what is your favourite book to read", "What is your favourite subject at school and why".... (no questions that could be answered with one word answers)
We had all the girls take a seat and gave them 1 minute to ask as many questions as possible of the person sitting opposite them (they could use our questions or some of their own). When the 1 minute was up everyone in one row moved down a seat.... and it continued until each girl had spoken to each other.
We finished by forming our chairs into a giant circle and asking the girls to share if they had found anyone that had something in common with them.... they found so many commonalities which surprised them and us!
We then gave each girl a sticky note with someone elses name on it, placed it on their forehead with the instruction not to look at it and played a quick game of headbandz..... the clues to find out who was on your head came from everything the room had learnt about that named person.
We had a lot of laughs and really learnt so much about each other.
