The ‘turn the sheet’ free team-building game is particularly good because it can be adapted to make it easier or harder as needed. This activity also gets people laughing and helps trainers to overcome the challenge for trainers of getting participants active and engaged.
Duration and Cost
- 10 minutes is a good time frame for this activity although you can add on 5 minutes after the activity itself, for discussion about how the participants felt about the activity.
- This is a FREE activity that you can build into your training plan (and that is included in some of our training packages including the soft skills trainers packs).
Category
- Team Building
- Ice breaker
Number of Participants
6 or more (but it can be done in groups of 4 if needed). This can work well in fact with very large teams also, such as for 10 or 20 people.
Purpose of This Activity
This task helps to get the team members to work together by getting them to cooperate and coordinate each other’s actions.
This task though can be a wonderful ice breaker because it is one of those activities that gets everyone laughing and is generally great fun to take part in.
Participants have to stand on a bedsheet on the floor and then have to turn the sheet over on its opposite side, without anyone from the team stepping off the sheet.
Activity Instructions
As the trainer, make sure you have a spare or old bed sheet that you have cut into smaller parts, i.e. use a one-bed sheet cut into two so you can provide two teams with a sheet.
In the classroom, you will then ask teams of 6 or more people to stand on one group.
You then give them 10 minutes as a group to turn the sheet completely over.
No member of the team may step completely off the sheet. If they do, then they must start the task over again.
You can adapt this task to make it easier or harder for the teams by changing the size of the teams or the size of the sheet.
You might, for example, wish to have a sheet that is cut into quarters and which will make it harder for a team of 6 or 8 people to stand on and to turn over.
Benefits of this Game
This is a fun activity and a popular one because it gets people laughing and engaged as a group and helps to teach leadership.
Additionally and importantly, it also acts to reinforce the need to work together as a team and to help each other in order to achieve a goal.
Dr Paul Symonds
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Really Amazing Activity