Musical Chairs
Instructions:
Place the chairs lined up in a straight line so that there are enough chairs.
Music plays as participants circle the chairs
When the EMC randomly pauses the music, everyone must grab a chair. The one person left without a chair is out of the game.
Reorganize the chairs back as they were before, but remove another one.
Repeat until there is only one chair and two people.
The person who sits in the last seat once the music stops wins.
Modifications:
I love adding a little extra spice to this game. We line the chairs in a zig-zag pattern, and alternate the direction the chairs are facing–one faces the left, the next faces the right, the next faces the left, and so forth.
The director of my son’s preschool, Rukia Rodgers, casually shared that she prefers to play “Musical Islands.” They place scraps of carpet on the floor (you could probably also use hula hoops or chalk to create the island effect), and play the music. When the music stops, the children are challenged to secure a space on the island for themselves AND supportively pull their comrades onto the island with them–no one gets left behind.
Praxis (why + theory):
I like Musical Chairs because it provokes the competitive spirit in almost every participant.
My theory behind the game is this: no participant can remain static, nor can their movements occur in isolation within Musical Chairs; as a result, the co-temporal-spatial engagement initiates and sustains an awareness of a horizontal sociality–in other words, even though the game is a competition, we are equally all in this together. We have the same objective, the same amount of space, the same amount of time, and the rules apply to everyone.
The behavior and/or motion of each participant affects the sequential order of events that can precipitate failure for most and success for one. The visceral experience of anticipation and prediction exists because the fate of an individual participant is dependent on the movement of the collective.