Ideas for either:
Model for me - Call out an animal name and the students have to make a noise and model the animal.
- with adults you can extend this to other things like the queen she might wave to the crowd and say something queenly like - Thou ought bend thy knee in our presence.
If you get them really going as adults it not only teaches them a great game for the kids but gets a few great laughs.
If you have a large open space my favourite energizer is to put people in teams of 6. Give them a towel or a piece of newspaper. Get them to stand on the towel one at a time - until everyone is on their �life-raft�.
Then challenge them to turn the raft (towel) over without anyone falling in the shark invested waters. This is guaranteed to get them giggling and active. A bit to challenging for pre-schoolers though.
A science experiment - this is great as little kids love doing this to. this takes a fair bit of preparation - but is so worth the looks on their faces. Give each group (6 people) a small container of milk, a bowl or saucer to pour the milk into. access to red, yellow and blue dye (food colouring is fine). And a detergent bottle.
1) pour milk into bowl
2) put a drop/dollop of each colour into the bowl - spaced widely apart
3) on your marks, get set, go - squirt a drop of detergent into your bowl.
- the colours go crazy and now you have a discussion on what colours you mix together to make other colours.
- for older kids you can use this as an experiment on how detergent works.
(I have seen this used as an energizer type activity for primary teachers - it was the most talked about activity!)
Throw either an imagenery ball (this is hilarious) or a real, soft ball. Start a story chain - One wild and spooky night (emphasis with voice) throw the ball - each new person adds on 5 - 10 new words and then passes the ball. You can make a rule that the two people either side of the speaker must add sound effects.
Put in groups of 6 (my magic adult number - 4 is my magic children number). Call out a letter of the alphabet, a game (football), action, number, song, movie - anything really. The group have about 1 minute to form a freeze frame. then you yell FREEZE and then ask one or two people to describe another groups freezeframe. It is like creating a human painting or statues.
Of course at the beginning of the conference I highly suggest a meet and greet scavenger hunt. Give each person a list of things - one person who plays golf, one person who loves wearing barefeet etc - they have to go around the room collecting a name of a person for each item - has to be a different person for each item. First person to finish gets a prize.
If you want more let me know - but this is probably enough to get you started.
