Introduction

In the drama game called "Greetings" the students walk around the room introducing themselves to each other. If this is the first time meeting each other, they should introduce themselves with their names as well, e.g. "Hi, I'm Alissia, How are you?" Once they have greeted most, preferably all, of the members, the teacher tells them different adjectives or emotions that the kids should use to introduce each other. That could be something like: "You are in a sad mood." or "You haven't seen each other in over 2 months and are really excited to see each other now." Other ideas could be: happy, dangerous, tired, hungry, high pitched voice, whispering (we had to use this one, when our neighbour group was a bit annoyed with us.. so this might be a good idea for a classroom that is right next to another one!), greeting someone you love, greeting someone you hate, etc. Once we have acted out all the ideas I had, we still had about 4 minutes left, so I ended up asking the kids for their ideas and they had so many more and were really exciting sharing and acting out their ideas.

Target group and Time

I guess this game would work well with every age group, as you can change the way they have to greet each other. Depending on the size of the group, I'd say this should take 5-10 min. max. 

Learning objectives

The kids will improve their confidence, as they have to walk around by themselves introducing them to each other. As well as building up their confidence they connect, e.g. the adjective "dangerous" with gestures and mimics of the other students, which will help them remember the meaning of the different adjectives. In other words, this could be a good game for the beginning of an English lesson, to repeat the learned words with the kids.

Instructions to set up the activity

All you need is enough space for the kids to walk around and maybe make sure that other classes will not be disturbed if it gets too noisy.

To begin with, the kids will need to walk around freely greeting each other until the instructor gives them a new emotion. It might help if you find a sign to which the kids need to stop and listen to the new emotion, e.g. clapping your hands.

Here you can find the ideas summarised one more time: high pitched voice, standing on one leg, happy, greeting someone dangerous, being shy, being cool, hot (temperature), cool (temperature), sad, scared, whispering, screaming, pretending to be a monkey, tired, hungry, greeting someone you hate, greeting someone you love.

Letting it run

As mentioned before, it can help to ask the kids themselves for ideas when you run out of ideas. Some of their ideas were: high pitched voice, being very cool, jumping on one leg, pretending to be a snake - yes, with this one we were all crawling around on the floor...