Activity 5: Frozen Tag
Part of Moral Tales
Activity time: 8 minutes
Materials for Activity
- A sound maker
- Optional: Bean bags for all participants
Preparation for Activity
- Find a large open space indoors or out of doors.
- Read the description of this activity and decide which rules you will use.
Description of Activity
This is a cooperative game of tag that involves the children in helping one another. You can play it a number of ways, using these basic rules:
- One person, or several in a large group, will be tagger(s).
- Everyone who is not a tagger moves around the open space. The tagger counts to ten and then begins to chase the runners.
- When a tagger catches a child, that child must freeze in place. Another child can unfreeze them either by crawling through the frozen child's legs or shaking their hand. (Choose which in advance, so that frozen children know whether to stand with legs astride or hand extended).
- When the frozen child has been freed both they and the helper can go free, but the tagger can tag the helper, in which case both are frozen.
The game ends if everyone is frozen, or when you end it by sounding the chime or other instrument.
If space is limited you can play Bean Bag Frozen Tag. Every child must move while holding a bean bag on their head. If a child is tagged, they must put the bean bag on the ground and stay frozen until a helper picks it up and puts it back on their head without dropping their own. If children drop their bean bags while moving, they also freeze with their bean bag on the floor until a helper rescues them.
The goal of this activity is for the children to experience what it is like to help someone else even when it involves risk to oneself. Children will also experience what it feels like to need someone else's help and have a chance to think intentionally about how they wish to be treated.
Including All Participants
Children who have limited mobility can play from their chairs and can be tagged and unfrozen just as the other children; make it clear to the group that everyone is in the game, whether or not they are moving around when unfrozen.