September 12, 2011

Fun Get to Know You Game (or Pumpkin Pile-up)

At our church, I help lead bimonthly activities for a group of 8 to 11 year old girls, called Activity Days.  This past week, we did a fun get to  know you activity since many of the girls hadn't met each other before.

In this game, the girls found out about each other and laughed, a lot.  I called it Pumpkin Pile-up because I put the all the slips of paper in a plastic halloween pumpkin, and because the girls end up sitting on each other.  



To play this game, you need one chair for each player and a list of "if" statements.  Here are some things from my list:


if you like to listen to Christmas music in September
if your favorite color is blue
if you have a pet
if you’ve ever visited another country
if you like cake more than ice cream
if you play a sport
if horses are your favorite animal

if you play the piano
if recess is your favorite subject in school

if you love to cook
if you are the oldest in your family
if you’ve lived in another state
if you get scared easily

if you are grumpy when you don’t get enough sleep
if you complain when it’s time to take a shower
if you like to buy things at yard sales

if you are afraid of spiders

if you sleep with a stuffed animal or blankie
if you have a nickname
if you have super powers
if you’d rather have a pet monkey than a pet dog
if you’ve been on a roller coaster
if you’d rather go swimming than bike riding

if pizza is your favorite food

I added more as I thought of them.  The game goes quickly, and most girls wanted to keep playing even after we had run out of questions.  


Everyone starts in a chair.  The leader picks up a slip of paper and says "move over one seat" and then reads the paper.  So you get "Move over one seat if pizza is your favorite food".  If it applies to you, you move over one seat.  But, if someone is already sitting in that seat and isn't moving, you just sit on their lap.  You end up getting several girls sitting on each other.  If someone on the bottom needs to move over one seat at some point, you just get up and let them move, and then sit back down on your seat again.




We'd ask the girls to elaborate on some of the things, like telling us their nicknames as they moved over, or telling us what things make them scared.  Girls who weren't moving also liked to chime in with their favorite food or favorite color, so there was a lot of talking among the girls, and I think everyone left feeling happy and feeling like they had made some new friends.

8 comments:

  1. I love this!!! Perfect idea for my activity days girls this week:) thank you!

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  2. We are going to use this as our ice breaker at the our first Girl Scout meeting of the year tomorrow! Thanks for the fun game!

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    1. Glad you found it useful! I hope it went well!

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  3. Totally using this tomorrow for our activity, thanks for the idea!

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  4. I will be using this for our Activity Day tomorrow! Thank you so much! Our ward is tiny, so we combine boys and girls (they don't do scouts here) ages 6-11. So, we having a wide range of maturity and having boy/girl has made it tough to come up with ideas. I love that this is simple, easily understood, unisex AND sounds like loads of fun! Thank you for sharing!!

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    1. so glad it could be helpful! It really is a fun game. Hope the kids liked it! Thanks for commenting.

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  5. Looking forward to doing this at my daughter's upcoming Late Over Birthday Party. Thanks so much!

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