Description
In this Easter Icebreaker, youth will need to discover each other’s secret Easter identity.

Resources
Colorful Plastic Easter Eggs (one for each youth)

Preparation
Place a piece of paper inside each plastic Easter egg with an item on it. All items are related to Easter. Here is a list of potential items:

Easter items related to the Biblical account:
Gray fleece or donkey (Matthew 21:2-5), Palm branch or a coat (Matthew 21:8-11), A vial of perfume (Matthew 26:7-13), A lock of hair (Matthew 26:7-13), 30 silver coins or 3 10-cent coins (Matthew 26:14-15), A strip of terry cloth fabric or towel (John 13:4-11), A communion wafer or bread (Matthew 26:17-29), A communion cup or grape (Matthew 26:17-29), , Praying hands (Mark 14:32-42), A watch (Mark 13:37), Rooster or a feather (Luke 22:61), Piece of rope (John 18:12), A leather whip (John 19:1), Small piece of soap (Matthew 27:20-24), A piece of scarlet cloth (Matthew 27:28), A crown of thorns (Matthew 27:29), A cross (John 19:16-22), nails (John 19:16-22), Dice (John 19:23-24), darkness or Black circle (Luke 23:44-45), sponge with vinegar (John 19:28-30), spear (John 19:32-37), A shattered or split rock (Matthew 27:51, 54), Purple cloth (Matthew 27:51), Clean linen cloth or gauze (Matthew 27:57-61), Spices (Luke 23:55-56), A stone and wax or paraffin (Matthew 27:65-66), an empty tomb (Matthew 28:5-8), Sign reading “King of the Jews”

Easter items NOT necessarily related to Biblical account:
Easter Basket, Bells, Easter Bonnet, Bunny Hop, Candies, Chicks, Chocolate, Chocolate Rabbit, church, Peter Cottontail, Daffodil, Easter Card, Easter Egg, Egg Hunt, Egg Tree, Faberge, Hard Boiled egg, Hot Cross Buns, Jelly Beans, Lamb, Easter Lilies, Marshmallows, New Clothes, Easter Parade, Passover, Pastel Colors, Peeps, Pretzels, Rabbit, Ribbons, Spring, Straw, Easter Sunday, Sunrise Service, Easter Bunny

What to Do

1. As each guest arrives at the door, give each youth a plastic egg with the secret item written inside (a person, a place, or a thing associated with Easter). It might be biblical or secular.
2. Youth must mingle with the others at the Easter party to discover each person’s secret identity as written on the piece of paper inside the plastic Easter egg.
3. Have a special prize for the person who correctly identifies the secret identity of the most people in the room by asking questions that can ONLY be answered with a simple “Yes” or “No”
4. Youth are obligated to answer questions but only by saying “yes” or “No”
5. The person who figures out everyone else’s “secret identity” first wins a prize! (You might want to provide a piece of paper for youth to write people’s names and their secret identity on.)

Variations
If you need to group the youth into teams for games or other activities, group them by color of Easter eggs. See Easter Egg Teams for specific detail on how to do this.

Easter Collection

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Fall is a time of new beginnings for many at school.

Whenever a new person joins the youth group or when a group of people come together for the first time, there is often a period of unease and tension. It is not because anyone has done anything wrong or because people are mean – it is simply because most of us have our guard up when we meet someone new for the first time. To make new persons feel at ease and relax the participants in a newly formed group, there are many games and activities that can be used as icebreakers and integration techniques.

Whether it is a new person joining a youth club, school or church group, or just a group of youth meeting together for the first time, the icebreakers must come as early as possible during the meeting. This will make each person feel like an integral part of the group, encourage active participation of all during activities and thus make the accomplishment of the goals of the group much easier.

So what are some of these icebreakers?

Round Repeat
Round repeat is a good example. Here, the persons in the youth group stand in a circle. The first person to be chosen is asked to say their name. This should be loud enough for everyone else to hear. Then the second person says the first person’s name and their own name. The next person gives the names of the two people in front and their own name. This goes on until the last participant who may be required to say the names of every single person in the group. This is a great way of learning the names. If the group is large, the last persons in the circle will have a difficult time recalling all the names. But the amount of fun during the game will have effectively broken any psychological walls between the youth.

Zip and Zap
Zip and Zap is another great game to break the ice and learn people’s names. The group sits in a circle. One person is chosen to sit in the centre of a circle as the first leader of the game. The simple rules of the game are then explained – Zip is right and Zap is left. The leader then points to anyone in the circle and says ‘Zip!’. The person pointed at gives the name of the person who is sitting on his or her right. If the leader says ‘Zap!’, the person gives the name of the person sitting on his left.

When the leader points at someone and says ‘Zip-Zap!’, the youth sitting on the immediate left and right of the person must switch places. If the call is ‘Zip-Zip!’, the person pointed at must say the name of the person seated two spaces away to their right. Same will apply to ‘Zap-Zap!’ only this time it will be their left. Anyone who is unable to correctly recall a name has to leave the circle perimeter and sit at the centre. The game continues until the last person is eliminated or until the last people remaining can remember the names of every person still on the circle.

Artistic Collaboration
A game that can be used for integration or even team building in a group of youth is artistic collaboration. The youth are grouped in sets of six or so persons. The six persons are assigned a table and each person is given a paper and a different color of crayon. They are then given the go ahead to start drawing a picture. When the coordinator shouts ‘change!’, all stand to move and sit on the chair on their right. They then continue drawing someone else’s picture. This goes on until everyone comes back to their original sitting position and looks at the finished picture!

Icebreakers Ahead: Take It To the Next Level

This 170 page resource not only provides 52 of the world’s most popular group icebreaker activities and games, but also includes lesson ideas and discussion questions to smoothly transition into conversations about the issues common to most groups.

Click here to find out how to get your hands on this incredible resource!

Introduction
Use this activity to introduce a topic and divide the youth into small groups or teams at the same time.

Game Description
Youth will break into groups with the each youth forming one of the letters of a keyword.

Game Materials
None

Game Preparation
Think about a keyword somehow related to the topic of discussion for your youth Bible Study or discussion. There will be one group member for each letter in the keyword, so if you want groups of 5 youth then you will need to come up with a word that contains 5 letters.

Game Play
Here is a sample dialogue

1. “Everyone please stand up. “
2. “I am going to give you a special word for the day. The word is _______. On the count of three, everyone shout the word back to me! 1 2 3 Ok, now say it twice as loud. Great! Three times louder! What is the Word? Great!”
3. “Next, when I give you the signal I want everyone to split into groups, with each youth using his or her body to form ONE letter of the word. As an example, everyone make a letter ‘A’ Great well done. If you don’t have enough youth to form all the letters, you might have to be a little more creative to spell the word with your bodies.”
4. “Does everyone understand? Do you know what you need to do? Are you ready? Go! Spell out the word with your bodies. And, DON’T be the last group to form the word. “

Variations

You can choose to have a fun forfeit for the group that is last or you can also make them go first when you have the follow-up youth discussion or activity. You can also call out different words of different lengths so that the youth are forced to keep forming and reforming groups to spell out different words until you call out a last word to get the youth into the final groups of the desired number.

Take it to the Next Level
Once you have them in groups of the desired number of youth, you can play games, have discussions, etc. This is a great way to introduce a topic because you have implanted the keyword into the thoughts of the youth. It also creates some energy and makes the awkward task of breaking up the youth into groups so much easier.

Icebreakers Ahead: Take It To the Next Level

This 170 page resource not only provides 52 of the world’s most popular group icebreaker activities and games, but also includes lesson ideas and discussion questions to smoothly transition into conversations about the issues common to most groups.

Click here to find out how to get your hands on this incredible resource!

Game Description
This game is based on the familiar English idiom to be “left holding the bag.” “Left holding the bag” refers to a situation when a person is abandoned by others involved so that they bear the blame or responsibility. Example: Everyone rushed home after the party left the room in a mess so the youth leader was “left holding the bag”. The phrase is a variation of one which dates back to about 1600 — to “give one the bag (to hold)” in which a person was left with an empty bag while others took all the valuable contents.

Game Materials

• A bag (You can use just about any bag for this but the game is more fun if it is a cloth bag that makes very little sound when dropped.)
• You’ll also need solid chairs for everyone as things usually get a little wild with youth diving for chairs. There should be one less chair than the number of participants.

Game Preparation

• All the youth are seated in a circle and one youth stands in the middle holding a bag.
• Safety Tip: Place the chairs in a tight circle with no gaps or you might have some youth miss the chairs and end up on the floor!

Game Play

• Select one youth to be in the center of the circle, “Holding the bag”.
• The youth in the middle of the circle must then walk around the circle and take the hand of another seated youth. (If you have an almost equal mix of girls and guys you can ask them to grab the hand of someone of the opposite sex.)
• That person then leaves his/her chair and takes the hand of another youth and so on.
• This continues until the first youth drops the bag and everyone runs to a seat.
• The youth left without a seat picks up the bag and the game begins again.

Variations
Play a few rounds and then add some items to the bag:

• Slips of paper, each with icebreaker styled questions like: “what is your Favorite Ice-cream? Most embarrassing moment? Happiest memory? Best vacation? Favorite movie? Favorite book?” etc.
• Slips of paper with a forfeit on each one. You can find examples of forfeits here: Game Forfeits
• Slips of paper with review questions from a previous lesson.
• Slips of paper with personal questions to introduce the topic of the next lesson.
• Charades that youth will need to act out for the rest of the youth to guess. (Can give points and have girls vs guys teams for the guessing)
• Items of clothing in the bag (pillowcase) – youth must pull something out and wear it.

Take it to the Next Level

• In real life, have you ever been left “holding the bag?” What happened?
• What feelings might a person have when they are forced to take the blame for someone else’s actions?
• Are there times when we let others take the blame for things we have done?
• Was Jesus “left holding the bag” when the disciples abandoned him at his arrest? Is it the same thing? Why or why not?

While we have to take responsibility for our own sins, Jesus wants to take the blame – He has stood in our place to take the punishment for us. There may still be consequences, but through His death on the cross we receive God’s forgiveness. He took the punishment for us!

Icebreakers Ahead: Take It To the Next Level

This 170 page resource not only provides 52 of the world’s most popular group icebreaker activities and games, but also includes lesson ideas and discussion questions to smoothly transition into conversations about the issues common to most groups.

Click here to find out how to get your hands on this incredible resource!

Game Description
Divided into at least 2 groups of 4-6 people, an individual youth will attempt to get his/her team to guess a name written on a piece of paper.

Game Materials

• Pens
• Small Pieces of Paper
• A Container (basket, hat, bowl, or bag) for each team
• Timer or stopwatch

Game Preparation

1. Cut several pieces of paper into small pieces, large enough to have a name written upon them. You want to have enough slips of paper for each youth to have 10 pieces.
2. Each youth writes down the names of 10 people on the 10 pieces of paper. These names must be famous personalities (real or fictional) as well as names of those in the youth group, their parents and other significant adults everyone knows.
3. Collect all the names into a container for each team and then distribute each container to a different team of youth than the one that wrote the names it contains.

Game Play
This icebreaker game for youth is play in rounds.

Round One

1. must describe that person to the other members of his/her team.
2. Every time a name is guessed correctly, another name is retrieved from the container.
3. Each team has one minute to guess as many names as possible.
4. If the youth get stuck on a name, they can set the name aside and draw a new name.
5. When the time runs out, add up the total number of names guessed and subtract those passed and set aside to calculate a score for each team.

Round Two

1. Put all the names back into the container.
2. This round is similar to Round One but a youth can only use one word to describe the person to his/her group. Some of the names will have already been guessed so it is easier then it seems.
3. Once again, calculate the score for each team

Round Three

1. This round of the game is played similar to the first two rounds, but this time, the youth must ACT out the name written on the paper without making any sounds.

Add up the scores from all three rounds to determine an overall winner.

Icebreakers Ahead: Take It To the Next Level

This 170 page resource not only provides 52 of the world’s most popular group icebreaker activities and games, but also includes lesson ideas and discussion questions to smoothly transition into conversations about the issues common to most groups.

Click here to find out how to get your hands on this incredible resource!