4Cs: More Activities for Communication

Communication is important. We can string words together and have them not mean anything at all. How I communicate is important….and how you communicate is important.

How many times have we said something and then said “oh, no, no, that is not what I meant”? It is about tone of voice, it is about what our face says. Good communicators are going to do better than those who are just academically good.

I believe that children need to learn good communication skills. It is not just written and spoken communication either. It goes beyond reading and writing.

Here is the previous post on activities for communication.

Why are Communication Activities for Kids Essential?

1. Reading books are not enough to learn communication skills.
2. Games are fun!
3. When learning communication in activities, you are free to make mistakes and at a personal pace.
4. It helps with expressing ideas

4 MORE ACTIVITIES TO TEACH COMMUNICATION

BACK TO BACK:

Two people sit back to back. One listens and the other one follows. It helps in developing the listening and speaking skills of the players involved. It is something you can do with younger children and then level up with our older children, asking for more advanced actions.

• Ask the pair of students to sit back-to-back so that they don’t see each other.
• Then ask one of the students to describe a drawing, a picture, or an object which the other student will try to draw or answer what that thing is.
• It is fun to see what the end results are
• Maybe you can use blocks or M&Ms to create a pattern.

We are communicating verbally for intent and this one has to listen and understand.

MOVEMENT STICKS:

Since body-language is a communication skill, this game is meant to improve the body language of students as it is non-verbal. You don’t have to use sticks. You can use balloons or paper, or another object.

To play this first highlight the need for this to be done without talking.

• Divide students into pairs.
• Place two sticks between the fingers of the pairs and ask them to work together to move across the room without dropping the sticks.
• This is done without talking. Use your face and body language.

BLINDFOLD OBSTACLE COURSE:

This is a fun blindfold game.

• Create obstacles with everyday items in the room.
• One person is to be blindfolded, while the rest of the group communicates instructions on how to navigate through the classroom without touching the obstacles or getting hurt.
• With younger children you can use a few objects and communicate movements like “take 5 steps to the right”.
• The group has to work together. You can’t be talking over the top of each other or the blindfolded person cannot hear and might get hurt walking into an obstacle.

IDENTIFY THE OBJECT

This is another fun blindfold game. You need about 4 -5 kids to play this game.

• Blindfold one child, while the rest of the players choose an object that can be described for easy identification.
• The group takes turn to describe part of the object.
• The blindfolded child can ask questions.
• The aim is for the blindfolded person to guess the object.

This can be fun to set a challenge to older students. When they describe one part they cannot use the exact word. For example: if it is a pink ball, they cannot say “pink”. They can say “it is not quite red and it is not quite white.”

The great thing about these activities is that they are also great activities for collaboration as well. When we are teaching skills based learning, it is easy to teach different skills in a variety of ways.

Here are other posts on skills based learning and activities for teaching the skills:
4Cs and Skills based learning – How does it work?
4Cs and Skills based learning – How do you teach it?
Activities for problem solving
8 Activities for communication
Activities for planning
Activities for collaboration