Trainers’ Toolkit – Calendarium

	Exercise nr 28: Calendarium
Duration	15 min
Type of activity	Social / Body / Emotional / Cognitive
The goal of the exercise	To show the variety of the group and the diversity of their life experiences. You can use this exercise also for the group integration process.
Group size	8-20 participants
Hashtags	#integration #intergenerationality #diversity
Apps	Zoom
Materials	Before the workshop, prepare a document with YEARS in a word file or google doc. Write years in the column, e.g.: 1978 – 1999 –  2000 – 2005 – Decide how many dates you would like to include in your calendar – it’s worth having at least as many dates as participants. These dates must refer to the period when participants were already born.
Exercise agenda	Share the prepared calendar file with the workshop participants. Ask each person to write anonymously about an event from their life connected to this date. Suggest that participants should pick one date. If there are more dates than participants, encourage people to select one more date. When everyone has finished writing, ask them to read their notes. You can decide if one person reads the calendar or if you do it as a team – each person can read their events, or each person reads someone else’s. Ask them to stay focused while reading. Everybody is sharing a piece of their life story, so urge them to appreciate this. After reading the calendar, ask participants for their impressions of the exercise. Examples of questions you could ask: What kind of feelings did you have when you were listening to the calendar? Are there any experiences that you have in common as a group? Is there a person in the group who was born when someone else was already an adult? What can we tell about our group from reading this calendar?
Possible modifications	In this exercise, it is essential both to appreciate diversity and to look for similarities. You can put some future dates in the calendar, e.g. 5 or 10 years from now. Sometimes it is helpful to see how participants imagine their lives in the future.
Credits	Compiled by Fundacja Culture Shock for TRENDSS – Transnational Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills (https://trendss.eu/)Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)Co-funded by the Erasmus+Programme of the European Union