Trainers’ Toolkit – Story of your name

	Exercise nr 35:  Story of your name
Duration	15-20 min
Type of activity	Social / Body / Emotional / Cognitive
The goal of the exercise	The aim is to introduce and verbally warm-up participants to use their creativity.
Group size	3-10
Hashtags	#introduction #teambuilding #names
Materials and tools necessary for the activities	No other materials needed
Exercise agenda	This is a popular way to start working with a group and works well if bonding with the group and remembering participants’ names are important for future workshop activities.  Invite participants to think of stories of their names and share them with the group. For example, why it was chosen, by whom and how they felt about it throughout their lives. Each person will have two minutes to share their story with the group.  Timer 2 minutes with a buzzer to keep participants on schedule. The simplest way to start this is by you telling the story of your name. Then there is no need for detailed instructions or explanations. Ask participants to invite by name the next person to speak.
Possible modifications	You can share your board and ask participants to write their names on it all at once. The other modification idea is to ask participants to share their stories in pairs and then summarise their partners’ stories in the forum
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 4.0Co-funded by the Erasmus+Programme of the European Union