Resistance skills curricula often begin with exercises and games that help students more thoroughly like and understand themselves. These games include having students make as many different words out of the letters of their names as possible in a given time. Kids who list the most words win. Teachers can then discuss the positive or negative nature of the different words. Another common game asks students to think of times when they were bullied or succumbed to peer pressure. Students then state out loud what they should have done to avoid being pressured or bullied. Students can then vote on the best response.
Role-playing games and exercises form the core of most resistance curricula. In two-player games, students can play either a teacher or a student. Students can make provocative statements such as a drug the student saw on television "looked really cool," or "my parents use drugs" or "everybody does it," whatever it is. The "teacher" can then counsel the "student" as he thinks a good teacher should. In another game, a student can confide to a peer that she has been taking her "mother's pills" to help her relax. The student taking pills can say, "It came from a doctor, so it is totally safe." The non-pill-taking student can then respond appropriately.
Students can learn about people in history, like Rosa Parks or Mohandas Gandhi, who stood up for their values and resisted the pressures around them. Students can then role play those historical figures resisting pressures to conform and then discuss how those historical figures resisted peer pressure. Some students can assume the personalities of any historical figures the whole class knows and discuss how they succeeded by resisting peer pressure. Students can break into groups of three, each composed of a student who pressures, a student who is pressured and a teacher who puts a stop to the pressure. Students can then discuss what the "teacher" got right and did wrong.
The website of the Attorney General of the United States suggests that kids should be discouraged from pressure to use drugs by taking a true-false quiz with such questions as: "Police officers are there to help me and keep me safe. It is OK for me to drink alcohol if I am with my friends. If a good friend offers me drugs, it is OK to take them. I should always tell my parents or a trusted adult when someone tried to give me drugs. Smoking is bad for my health." Board games are another option, with one player per board designated as a drug user and penalized in such a way as to ensure that player’s constant disadvantage. If the game is Monopoly, for example, the drug user might be required to spend $200 dollars for drugs each time around the board.