Transcript: Pass it On!

Alexa Southall:

My name is Alexa Southall and I am a member of the California Center for School Climate’s Youth Advisory Team. I worked with the team to develop the Cultivating Caring Relationships at School Toolkit. One of the activities I contributed was Pass It On. I really like this activity because it encourages students to get up out of their seats and talk to their peers. Now, I’m going to quickly walk you through the components of this activity and through my demonstration hopefully you will get a chance to see how the activity would work.

This activity is an in-person activity that should take about 20 minutes. In this activity students will answer questions about themselves on a sheet of paper and then crumple up the sheets of paper to replicate a snowball. A timer will be set and during those 30 seconds, the students will pass around the snowballs. When the time is up, they’ll then try to find the original owner of the snowball by asking questions from the prompts.

Each activity has the materials and instructions needed on how to prepare for facilitation. Now, I am going to walk you through how to set up this activity. It’s important to display the prompts for students to see throughout the activity for reference. They’ll need a sheet of paper and pencil in which they can answer the prompts on the sheet of paper. They will then crumple it up and they will pass it around during a 30-second timer. When the timer is up, the idea is for the students to be able to communicate with one another, asking them the questions on their sheet of paper. Their goal is to find the original owner of the snowball by finding responses that match those on their paper. The activity ends when all the snowballs are returned to the students; however, if there is more time available, this process can be repeated for another round. Follow-up is not required for this activity; however, you can expand relationship building by asking the following prompts to continue building relationships. This activity has two tips and modifications. For each activity within the toolkit, you can use this section to adapt the activity to your classroom.

Now that we went through the activity, I want to highlight why this activity is important to relationship building. I believe that this activity helps with relationship building because it allows students to communicate with one another and build relationships with the students in their class. This is crucial because, throughout the year, students need to be able to rely on one another and not be afraid to ask for help when they need it.

This has been my activity, Pass It On.