Help both children and adults to retain material by playing card games. For instance, make playing cards to teach biology that are printed with different organisms, such as a hawk and a mouse. The children can play various games with the cards. For instance, they can play a modified version of War, in which two people compare their cards; the person holding the organism that is higher on the food chain gets to keep both cards, and the person who has the most cards in the end wins.
Have children make their own games to help others learn. This can be a stunningly effective way of reinforcing the material in the minds of the children making the games, which are often effective learning tools for other students. For instance, kids doing a history presentation on World War II can create a Jeopardy game about the subject, in which correct answers to increasingly difficult questionsI are worth increasing amounts of money. Alternatively, kids could create a math version of Monopoly, in which instead of rolling the dice to figure out how many steps to move pieces, players solve math expressions on the game board to figure out the total number of steps to move.
Use role-playing activities to help adults in the workplace figure out how to deal with situations germane to their jobs. For instance, stage a problem that comes up frequently in the workplace, and ask the employees at hand to improvise a solution. Role-playing is fun, gets people involved in a hands-on manner and gives your employees practice cooperating with each other. After the role play, discuss both the positive and negative aspects of the employees' response with the group.
Teach your employees how to communicate by having them create a product similar to what they will have to create on the job, but using only verbal communication. For instance, put five people who need to build an architectural model together, and blindfold the one person who will be building the model. Have the other four people describe to him, in detail, how the model should look. Afterward, compare the finished model product to original expectations of what the model should look like, to gauge employees' effectiveness in purely verbal communication.