The afternoon sessions of our training course “Comedy as a Tool – Enhancing Youth Engagement through Humor” started with very much needed movement after the lunch, so we did a musical chairs energizer.
Now it was time to discuss and learn about visual perception, verbal and non-verbal communication. We did this through the “Times up” game on which everyone needed to propose famous people that we needed to present in different ways to the other participants who needed to guess the persons. We did this in 3 rounds within small teams. The task for the first round was to explain the person in 30 seconds, the second round’s task was to explain the person with one word and the last round was to explain only with gestures. It was a very fun and enjoyable exercise that taught us how to create a good ground for effective communication. After the exercise, we spoke about the different ways of verbal and non-verbal communication, their importance in using it properly and how we can practice them effectively in youth work.
After a short break, we needed to regain some energy for the last session of the day. For that reason, we did 2 energizers, the first one consisted of counting to 25 without two people saying the same number twice and later we did the “I love you, but I cannot smile” energizer.
After we were energized, we had activities that actors exercise for building trust between partners. We started with a simple task in pairs, where one of us needed to do a free-fall while the other needed to catch us. Then we got blindfolded and had to pass through obstacles by trusting our partner who was leading us with instructions. We did different scenarios that presented different obstacles, such as physical objects, sound barriers, noise, mental discouragement etc. These exercises allowed us to build further the trust within the group but also to recognize the different barriers that might appear in the communication process.
To close the day, we did reflection and evaluation of today’s activities by focusing on the conclusions regarding effective communication and barriers that might occur.
After dinner, we had the first intercultural night, where Macedonia, Poland, Slovenia and Romania presented their countries and cultures in interesting and engaging way. They have also presented their dances, food and drinks with us.
