Team Building Activities for the Visually Impaired

Team-building games are amusing ways to encourage a group of strangers to get to know each other while completing an enjoyable activity together. Groups that are visually impaired experience difficulties when attempting common icebreaker games that could result in accidents or injuries or are just not physically possible. However, plenty of team-building games will engage your visually impaired team members while keeping them safe and allowing them to foster quick friendships.

Have your group introduce themselves with this energetic and challenging game. Gather everyone in a circle. Select one person to start. That person must state his name and make a specific sound. Examples of possible sounds are two claps, a whistle, three snaps, a sung note, shuffled feet, stomped feet or any number of sounds. The player next to him must repeat the first player's name and his sound, then add her own name and sound. Continue all the way around the circle, with each person adding his own name and sound to the growing list.

Assign each group member a partner. Have them sit on the floor, one in front of the other, so that one participant is facing the other's back. Give the person facing her partner's back a slip of paper with a word written in Braille. Each of the words relates to the subject matter of the gathering. The leader must time the session. When he says go, the player uses her finger to draw the first letter of the word on her partner's back. Talking is not allowed. The player being "written" on writes down the letter on a slip of paper. The writer draws each letter of the word, one-by-one, on her partner's back. After 2 minutes, the leader stops the group, and all the players who were written on say the words they felt on their backs.

Replicate a sculpture with small plastic self-linking blocks. It does not matter what the sculpture is. Place it on a table in the center of the room. Divide the group into teams. Each team must be given enough building blocks to be able to duplicate your sculpture. Give the teams a time limit of 20 minutes, and instruct them to work together to make a replica of the sculpture. The only rule is that only one person at a time from each team can come up to inspect the sculpture with his hands, and the same person cannot go twice in a row. They must take turns studying it and reporting back to the group. At the end of the time limit, let everyone inspect each other's sculptures to see who came closest to the original.