Typhoon

A typhoon is blustering its way around the whiteboard and your class is caught in the chaos! As sticky ball games go, on the spectrum from educational to just fun, this one skews way towards the latter. Sometimes it’s nice to just have some silly diversion though.

Materials

• sticky ball
• whiteboard
• whiteboard markers

How to play

1. Scattered around the board, draw some small targets, like pictures of your students’ faces.
2. Pick a random point on the board to be the starting point of the typhoon.
3. Students take turns throwing the sticky ball. Wherever the ball lands after a throw, the typhoon travels to that point in a straight line. Any faces (or whatever targets you drew) that the typhoon crosses are “out”.
4. Let all of the students take one or two turns and see who makes it through the inclement weather unscathed.

How to play (visual guide)

The faces of six students are drawn on the whiteboard along with a red X a little left of center.

Draw a variety of students around the board and pick a place for the titular typhoon to start.

A sticky ball has hit the upper right area.

A student throws a sticky ball to where they want to typhoon to travel.

A line is drawn from the starting point chose at the beginning of the game to the point where the ball landed, crossing one student's face. The sticky ball has now landed on the lower right.

Draw a line from one typhoon position to the next. Every student that is crossed by the line has been blown away by the typhoon. Another student throws.

The line from before is extended to the point where the sticky ball landed, crossing over two more faces.

Yet more students are cast away to the Land of Oz!

Variations

• This an excellent opportunity for students to show off their artistic skills by drawing the targets themselves. Save time by having several students draw at once.
• Instead of a typhoon blowing away your poor students you could have a hungry hippo gobbling up fruit, a bumble bee pollinating a field of flowers, a trick-or-treater visiting haunted houses, etc.
• This can easily be turned into a team game. Targets belonging to a team can be drawn in a certain color. In the normal typhoon game the teams would try to blow away all of the other team’s students. In the bumble bee variation the students try to get the bumble bee to visit all of their team’s flowers first.
• Another option for a team game is to have two types of typhoon instead of two types of target. Using the hungry hippo example above, each team could take turns moving their hippo around the board, trying the eat the most fruit.
• Depending on what other rules you play with, you could include targets that must be avoided at the risk of suffering some penalty.
• If you must integrate this game into your lesson you could have the students describe what’s going to happen in the future before throwing (“The typhoon’s going to blow away Max.”) or describe the result after throwing (“The hippo ate a strawberry and a mango.”).

Considerations

• This game is slower to set up and play than others, so make sure you have enough time.
• In my example I drew a line following the typhoon’s path, but you could just as easily just use your eraser.
• It’s easy to forget the typhoon’s position, so have a way to keep track. I always leave a colorful magnet at the typhoon’s current position.
• All of the typical sticky ball considerations still apply.

Further reading

Check out this article for a list of sticky ball games to play:

Sticky ball games