Practice being a game leader
Before you begin
- Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to 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 if you’re short on helpers.
Talk about teams and choose a leader
- Ask everyone what they think is important when someone’s leading a game. People could think about things such as listening to everyone, giving instructions that are easy to understand, helping anyone who doesn’t understand, making fair decisions, and sorting out any problems.
- Choose someone to be the game leader. They may ask for volunteers, or they may have some people in mind. You could choose one person at a time, or people could lead in pairs.
- Remind everyone else to be good team players so they enjoy the game and help the game leader—leading everyone can be a bit scary if you’re not used to it.
Play fruit salad - or another game
- The game leader should choose a game to play. They might choose their favourite game, but take time to make any safety considerations for their chosen game.
- In this example, we’ve used the game ‘Fruit Salad’. This game works best if everyone has a marker to show were they were sat, such as a floor dot or cone. You could also use chairs in a circle facing outwards, so people can stand up and move easily.
- Ask everyone to sit in a circle. They should make sure that there’s enough space for people to move around the outside of the circle.
- Choose four different types of fruit. They should walk around the circle, tap people on the shoulder, and give them a fruit name. They should give the fruit names out in order, so every fourth person will be the same fruit.
- Check that everyone knows what fruit they are. They could ask each fruit to put their hands up in turn, or could ask if anyone doesn’t remember their fruit. If anyone’s forgotten their fruit, you can work out what fruit they are, or just give them a new one.
- Now it’s good to have a practice round. They should call out the name of one of the fruits. Anyone with that fruit name should get up, run around the edge of the circle, and sit down in a different place to where they were before.
- Keep running practice rounds until they think everyone understands the rules and is ready to play.
- Keep calling out fruits, and everyone should keep getting up and running around the edge when their fruit name is called.
- If the game leader calls ’fruit salad’, everyone should stand up, run around the edge, and sit in a different space to the one they were in before.
- Try different things to keep the game fun and make sure everyone’s interested. They should watch everyone carefully, so they can tell if they’re getting bored, or if the game is too easy or too difficult.
- Once the game leader has finished their turn at leading, everyone should give them a clap for trying their best to make the game fun.
- If there’s more than one person ready to be a game leader, make sure each leader doesn’t lead for too long so the players don’t get bored.
- Make it competitive—the last person to find a seat could be ‘out’ and have to join the team leader. The game leader should think about whether the people playing will enjoy this, or whether it would make it less fun. How will make sure the ‘out’ players don’t get bored?
- The game leader could make up a story—rather than just saying fruits, they could include them in a story about going shopping, or making and eating a fruit salad.
- The game leader could play tricks, by starting to say a fruit name and changing their mind, or ending up saying a different fruit. They could even call out fruits that aren’t in the game, or words that sound a bit like a fruit (for example, ‘great’ instead of ‘grape’).
- The game leader could speed up or slow down the game. Will they give everyone lots of time to run around and sit down before they call the next fruit, call them one after another, or even set another fruit off before one has finished?
- The game leader could call fruits in pairs.
- The game leader could tell the fruits how to move each time they call their name, for example, crawling, jumping, or tiptoeing. They’ll have to think about actions everyone can do without hurting themselves or taking too long.
Reflection
This activity gave everyone a chance to think about what makes a great leader, and gave some people the chance to give it a go. The game leaders should tell everyone what they enjoyed about leading the game. Did they find anything tricky? What did the game leaders think about when making decisions? Did they just think about what they wanted, or did they look at everyone else and think about them? How did everyone act? The game leaders could thank everyone for listening, being respectful or being kind!
This activity also needed everyone to work together—including by working with the game leader to make sure they could make the game fun for everyone. How did you help the game leader out? Maybe you listened carefully, and kept quiet when they were talking, or maybe you didn’t challenge their rules. Did the game leader do a good job? It’s always good to tell someone what they did well and what they were good at!
Safety
All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.
- Active games
The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed. Take a look at our guidance on running active games safely.
The game leaders could also choose their own version of ‘Fruit Salad’ — the theme doesn’t have to be fruit. Maybe they want to turn the game into vegetable soup, colours of the rainbow or a seasonal theme, such as Halloween?
- You don’t have to make the game competitive—you can ask (or tell) the game leader not to introduce anything that makes it competitive if competitive games don’t work for all of the players.
- Make sure any actions are things everyone can do.
- The game leader doesn’t have to tap people on the shoulder to name them. Make sure they know if anyone doesn’t like to be touched.
All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.
