Play Treetop Twist

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help.

Learning the game

• Gather everyone together and explain you’re going to play a game to learn more about trees. Ask if anyone knows any parts of a tree or anything you might find in a tree.
• One member of the group is the Forest Leader. This person will call out the instructions. It could be a young member, young leader or adult volunteer.
• Everyone else should stand in the centre of the space, ready to respond to the commands with the appropriate action.
• Everyone should practice the Forest Leader’s instructions. Read them out one at a time and show everyone the action. Let them have a practice.
• You could choose a selection from or all the following:
  • Leaves: Stand on one foot with the other foot and flap your arms like a leaf swaying in the wind.
  • Roots: Pretend to dig deep like the strong roots do in the ground.
  • Bark: Stand with feet together and rub your hands together, just like the texture of rough bark.
  • Branches: Lie down as straight as you can on the floor, like a tree branch.
  • Twigs: Stand on your tiptoes, stretch arms up high, then sway gently.
  • Tree trunk: Stand tall and wide, then do a strong pose, like a sturdy tree.
  • Flowers: Spin around with your arms out wide, like petals.
  • Logs: Pretend to chop wood.
  • Birds: Flap your arms like wings.
  • Squirrels: Crouch down and pretend to gather acorns.
  • Seeds: Curl up in a small ball.
  • Treehouse: Pretend to climb up into a tree.
  • Tree rings: Players must get into pairs and hold hands, then spin together while pretending to be tree rings growing.
  • Apples: Pretend to collect imaginary fruit.

Playing the game

• Once everyone knows the instructions, play the game.
• You could also add in more actions as you go to make the game harder.
• You could start to get faster to make it harder and play it so the last person to do the action is out.
• Alternatively, if you want to people to become out as you play the game, you could add in these actions:
  • Forest (3, 4, 5, 6): Players must get into a line of that number of people as quickly as possible, then sway side to side. For example, for the command 'Forest three!', players must get into groups of three. Anyone without a group or with a lower number in their group could be out.

Winning the game

• The person left at the end of the game is the winner.
• If you want to do a longer warm up, or simply want to play again, play another game and change who the Forest Leader is.
• You could also ask people to create a new action and add it in, or you could add in another action you haven't used from the lists on this page.