Working with Younger Participants
We had a small but eager group at the workshop for working with younger participants. I shared some of my success stories of facilitating with four and five year olds for my thesis work.
Things to remember when working with younger participants:
Be flexible and roll with the changes. Younger children have their own ideas for how things will go. Lots of times it is different than you imagined but it’s not a bad thing. Think about the goal you want them to accomplish and if their way gets there, great.
Think about your materials. Building a tower out of index cards is hard for adults and darn near impossible for young kids. They will get discouraged easy. How can you get the same objectives across by using different materials? Maybe blocks instead of index cards.
Kids like to be moving and to be silly. Debriefing can be hard because they don’t like to be in one place. Break the debrief questions down into simpler questions. Walk them to the point you want addressed if you need to. They’ll have very insightful answers you just have to be patient and help them get to where you think they might want to go.
When providing guidelines for activities be aware of what kids are thinking. They might be trying to compete with other groups unless you explicitly say not too. This can cause them to miss the point of the activity.
A few questions that came up were:
How do you get engagement with the younger participants?
The best way I would answer this is too think about the activity you’re asking them to do. They want to be moving and engaging with their friends. Does the activity allow that to happen? If it does great, if it doesn’t it could be a hard time.
We also went through the attached packet and talked about the various activities. The favorite among my pre-kindergarten students were:
This or That – they loved the constant movement and getting to see what their friends choose.
Tower Build – They liked working as a group to build big towers. This one caught on even outside of the activity.
Link-Up – finding something in common with a friend is always great.
What Goes There – Admittedly, the enjoyed this one more because they liked being the ‘spotters’
Partner Introductions – fun but quick.