Virtual letter towers

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

Setting up this activity

• Gather together lots of prop and household items that people can use in this activity, such as balls, cushions, spoons, tea towels or towels, sports equipment, broom, TV remote, mugs, frying pan, mixing bowl, fruit, children's toys, and so on. You'll need to have more props than people.
• You can have multiple of the same item, but different sizes, colours and shapes.
• You could ask people to bring three items in from home.

Planning the meeting

1. Arrange to make contact with Scouts from another country. There are lots of ways to get in touch with Scouts in other countries. 
2. Explain that Jamboree on the Air and Jamboree on the Internet (JOTA JOTI) is an event specially designed to connect Scouts all over the world – it usually happens in October each year.
3. Everyone should chat about how they’ll introduce themselves and get to know a bit about the other group too.
4. This is a great time to remind people about staying safe online and not sharing personal information. If they’re uncomfortable or unsure about anything, they should chat to a trusted adult.

Before the JOTI-JOTA meeting

1. Ask each young person choose a six-letter word. People could work in pairs.
2. Young people should then find an object that begins with each letter of the word they chose.
3. For example, for the word ‘circus’ someone could find a chair, an ice cube tray, a ruler, a cookbook, an umbrella and a spoon.
4. Everyone should build a tower from these objects before the meeting starts. They want to create an anagram of the world. The objects don't need to be in the right letter order, so you could do spoon, ice cube tray, cookbook, umbrella, chair and ruler to create an anagram of ‘circus’.
5. You could build an example tower of your own to show everyone, which may be the example above.

Build towers

1. Everyone except the person leading the game should mute themselves.
2. The person leading the activity should show everyone their example tower.
3. They should explain that people need to find the first letter of each item. They then need to put the letters in the right order and unscramble the anagram to make a word. 
4. Everyone should take a few minutes to try to find the word. It may help to write their guesses on a piece of paper, starting with the names of the items, then rearranging the letters.
5. When the time is up, the person leading the game should ask people for their answers. People could put their hands up to share their answer and unmute themselves when it's their time to speak.
6. People could say the word they have or read out the letters they were guessing with if they’re unsure.
7. Once people have had a guess, the person leading the game should tell them the answer and the names of the objects they chose.
8. Everyone should take it in turns to show off their tower.
9. Everyone else should spend a couple of minutes writing down their guesses. A few people could share their guesses, then the person whose turn it is should reveal the correct answer.
10. Keep going until everyone’s had a chance to share their tower.