The following sections describe techniques for 'breaking the ice' during group meetings:

Self-Sorting and Talking

Choose a characteristic with a range of gradations and ask the participants to line up accordingly. This means everyone has to speak to each other, and people have awareness of who everyone is or where everyone has come from

For example:

• Alphabetic order of first names

• When their birthday falls during tile year (not the actual year)

• Distance from home to the place of the workshop

• Offer fun incentives for the first group to form such as a handful of sweets.

How many squares can you see?

• Draw squares on the flipchart

• Ask each participant to say how many squares they can see, give them 2

• minutes, and then go around the room and ask them to let you know

• You write on the flipchart the numbers, they will be different

• As them to sit in pairs and do the same thing again, give them about 2 minutes

• Write the answers on the flipchart and then ask them to sit in larger groups and repeat the exercise

• If they don't come up with the same number then go through the exercise in one large group.

• There are 30 squares in all, try it yourself

Puzzle Pieces - Putting People into Teams

Use a cut up picture, such a postcard or photograph for each group. Cut into as many pieces as there are group members. Give a piece to each participant and ask individuals to find the teams by joining the shapes together, without speaking to each other. If required the teams can be named after the picture on the card.

Lifeboats

Work out sets of numbers, which add up to the total number of participants (for a group of 15 it could be: 5,5,2,3 or 2,2,2,2,3,4, or 6,5,4 etc)

Tell the participants that they are on the Titanic, the lifeboats are different sizes and when you call abandon ship they must listen to the lifeboat sizes and form those groups as quickly as possible.

Do the game with a couple of variations on numbers then end with the group sizes you actually want e.g. three groups of 5.

Effecting the composition can vary the game, such as, saying each lifeboat must contain at least one woman.