team challenges
Do your youth often hang around with people in the same year group? Ours do too, but you can gently mix people up. We do this particularly on residentials, but why wait for the next one? Organise a team challenge, splitting people in the same year groups between different teams.
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The possibilities are endless.
Copy that cake!
The idea is simple enough and you can jazz it up as much as you want. Each team has to copy a cake. To make it more difficult:
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1. The cake that they're copying is out of sight and they can only send one team member at a time to look at it.
2. Each ingredient is with a leader who's hiding somewhere in the building.
3. While there are enough cakes for each team, and enough icing for each team, the decorations are more sparse, so maybe only five out of six teams will get Smarties or Chocolate Buttons.
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When we played, we had to copy a car (see on the box in the photo). We used a couple of Madeira cakes for the basic shape, then icing, various sweets and strawberry laces. To be fair, I think we should have won (ours was team 4 by the way), but judge's decision is apparently final and no discussion will be entered into!
movie scene
Have each team act out a single scene from a movie. For some reason, lots of our younger youth chose Titanic. General rules - everyone has to be involved (The director who was 12 looked at my acting skills and so I became a tree - not in Titanic obviously!). We gave them five minutes to work out the scene, which worked, but you could give them more.
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If you want to mix it up, just before they perform, give them a bonus card, e.g.
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Perform as a silent movie
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Perform the whole thing in song
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Perform with an Australian/British/American accent - whatever will work where you are
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Perform while dancing the entire time (yep, I was a dancing tree...)
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Perform backwards
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Perform in a foreign language
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Perform with a high-pitched voice.
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Perform at double speed
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Perform in slow motion
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Score each team with a scale of your choosing - involvement, grace, dialogue, effects, whatever you want.
gingerbread movie masterpiece
Gingerbread isn't just for Christmas. Why not ask teams of young people to create movie scenes from a ball of gingerbread? You can provide photos or titles, if you want to head them in a particular direction to link with your theme, or you can ask them to create any movie scene. The only difficulty will be judging them before they start eating Kevin...
Ingredients
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350g plain flour
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
100g butter
175g soft, light brown sugar
1 egg
4tbsp golden syrup
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Increase the quantities according to the number of teams and the scale of the challenge you want to create! This will make approximately 20 biscuits.
Instructions
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Put the flour, ginger and bicarb into a large bowl
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Rub in the butter
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Add sugar and stir in the syrup and egg to make a firm dough
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Roll out to about 5mm thick and cut our your shapes - shark, ship, burglar, whatever!
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Bake for 10-15 minutes until golden brown
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Once cooled (you may need to waft!), stick together with icing and decorate.
Photo by Nicole Michalou on Pexels
Photo by congerdesign from Pixabay
To work well, you probably need to set them up with the dough, otherwise it takes too long. Teams create the shapes, then do something else while the gingerbread bakes and cools. What about doing Speed Chatting which you can find here?​ Then bring the teams back together to finish their movie masterpieces?
bridge building challenge
Before you start, create a 'river' in your room 80cm wide. Blue material would be fine, but be as creative as you want. Find or create a boat 8cm tall (Lego would work fine) to ensure bridge is tall enough. Give these resources to each team:
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Paper and pen to design their masterpieces
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Newspapers
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A pair of scissors
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20 paper clips
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One roll of sticky tape
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A ball of string
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Anything else you want them to use
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You will also need a way to load the bridge at the end, perhaps using small tins, until it is destroyed.
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Teams have eight minutes to design a bridge able to take as much weight as possible spanning the ‘river’. The bridge must be 8 centimetres high or more in the centre and must be at least 8cm wide at the centre. No support may be put in the ‘river’. The bridge must be free standing although you may Sellotape it to the carpet. Teams can only use the materials provided. They then have twenty minutes to build the design.
Every member of the team must make some input to the design and the building of the bridge.
tower building challenge
Give these resources to each team:
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Paper and pen to design their masterpieces
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A packet of pasta (it goes a long way!)
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A packet of marshmallows
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A large tray to build on
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You will also need a tape measure.
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Teams have five minutes to discuss how to create the tallest tower possible. Teams can only use the materials provided. Every member of the team must make some input to the design and the building of the tower.They have twenty minutes to build the design.
alphabet soup
You might want to put down a tarpaulin.
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Give each team a large tray and a few cans of alphabet pasta (or if you want to be less messy (but why would you?!) alphabet cereal). Create a range of challenges for them:
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The longest word (scores a lot of points)
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Leaders' names
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Words of three letters
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Words of four letters
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Words of five or more letters
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Characters in the Bible
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In fact you can do whatever you want - spell out a whole Bible verse for example.
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Perhaps give five minutes to score as many points as possible.
classical painting challenge
Here's one we did recently. Have each team choose:
1. A leader (you can choose a famous person if you prefer)
2. The style of a famous artist
3. Doing an activity
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We chose Jackson Pollock, Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.
Activities were: starring in the ballet, as part of a circus act, as a Morris dancer (it's a UK thing, please don't hold it against us!), winning an Olympic competition, being crowned a monarch and as a farmer.
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The artists in the group stepped up, but everyone loved it.
This is me (surely you recognise that), winning an Olympic competition (think 2 Timothy 4.7), in the style of Van Gogh.
My good friend Thea, as a Morris Dancer, in the style of Pablo Picasso.
Teams were given about 40 minutes to create their masterpieces. New skills were discovered, conversations started and there was a lot of mess.
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Mix it up by getting teams to paint a leader (again, or famous person) just using their fingers. 15-20 minutes should be enough to get some fairly awful paintings...
six challenges
Put each team around a table and give each team all six puzzles to work on at the same time. This is one we did:
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Solve a Rubik's Cube
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Complete a wordsearch
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Untangle a mass of rope
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Use the entire lip balm on one person's lips
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Answer a year 6 (10-year-old) SATS maths paper
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Solve ball puzzle (one of those square plastic maze puzzles with a ball bearing inside that you need to get a ball from the start to the end of)
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Our learning was to have tissue available for the lip balm people. They were covered!
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Having six challenges allows each team member to focus on one, rather than one super-keen person doing the challenge while everyone else watches.
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spider's web
Set up in a room a spider's web of wool. Make holes of different sizes. Teams have to get from one side of the web to the other. You can award points for teamwork.
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Make it more difficult by saying that two young people can't go through the same hole, marking each used hole with a clothes peg.
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mini challenges
You don't have to spend a long time on a challenge, you can rotate teams round multiple challenges with just a few minutes to score as many points as they can, giving out different points for speed, teamwork, objects found, questions answered, etc. Or you can link them together by giving them a puzzle piece after they complete each challenge. At the end, they can put all the pieces together. Or you can give them a clue after each challenge, which, when joined together, will lead them to a prize.
an alphabet of flags
Print out cards showing different country's flags which they need to name. We used an A-Z approach, with just a blank card with X on it (there isn't a country beginning with X.
what do they do?
Depending how many leaders you have, try to get young people to match leaders' occupations. Leaders can be clever in how they describe their occupations: I sometimes call myself an author which is true, but confuses them. Buy my book here.
hidden treasure
Get hold of a sand pit and hide about twelve gold coins in it. Make it big to make it more difficult.
Sort the skittles
Have the young people sort the skittles into colour order (but don't let them eat them, or the game will get progressively shorter).
brand slogans
Give the teams a selection of cards showing photos of different brands, as well as matching slogans. They have to match the two. Examples would be Walt Disney, Adidas, Apple, L'Oreal, M&Ms, Lego, Burger King, McDonald's, BBC, Vodafone, Argos and Dulux.
panto pirates
Is it only the UK where panto is a thing?
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Have the young people recreate a movie scene starring a pirate, or any other theme that links in to whatever you're doing.
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Once done/attempted give them points/ puzzle piece etc.
finish the lyric
Give team perhaps eight sets of lyrics to work out. They'll soon be out of date, but something like:
That you were ______, you were throwing _________
And my daddy said, "Stay away from _________"
There's a whole chapter called 'Cherish' with great ideas for caring for your youth in my book: RAISING THE BAR.
“Comprehensive, practical and soundly theological. My go-to resource for all of my questions... This book is a must-have for any newbies especially and I still dip into it often.”
Becky Hepworth, Youth Worker
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