Blindfold activities!!! Super cool!

Blindfold activities impel students into working together more closely, promoting interaction and trust building among the students. For the sake of ELT teaching, this type of activity can be great warm-ups or wrap-ups and come very handy when we have to teach how to give directions. Below, I selected a number of activities for you to have a try.

Blindfolds Robot Wars Procedures: Players work in pairs, a controller who is sighted and a robot who is blindfolded. The robot is in the marked zone and scores points by picking up paper balls and then throwing them at the other robots in the zone. The controller is outside the zone and directing their robot verbally as to where to find the paper balls and then which direction to throw them in. 3 minutes per round works well.

Blindfolds route re-trace Procedures: Place a marker on a large grassed area. Stand a player at the marker wearing a blindfolds. Then give them walking instructions along the lines of 2 steps forward, 5 right etc. When they get to the end of the trail give them the reverse instructions. The goal is that they should finish as close to the start point as they can. Work in pairs, one wearing blindfolds and the other sighted to give instructions and check for safety.

Blindfolds line up (by Height order) Blindfold everyone in the group then ask them to line up in height order; (by birthday order) Blindfold everyone, then same as above but in birthday order; (by alphabetic order) Blindfold everyone, then same as above but in order of first name. Afterwards it could be by surname; (by shoe size) Blindfold everyone, then same as above but in order of shoe size.

Minefield Procedures: Lay a large number of soft objects to be avoided on a grassed area. Amongst them place some soft objects to be retrieved. Then in each pair one person is blindfolded and must be guided by the other to retrieve the targets without touching any of the mines.

Peg the Partners Procedures: Students partner up. One person gets blindfolded and is given a softball. The other player in the pair leads her around by the arm and gives her instructions on how to throw the ball to hit another blindfolded person. The blindfolded player who receives a hit picks up the ball and throws it at another person with a blindfold on and so on. The seeing partner can guide his teammate with his voice about how to defend herself. If a team is hit twice, that pair is out of the game. The last team standing wins.