Trashcan Basketball
Instructions
Set your basket/trashcan about 8 feet away from you
Prepare to provide short, written responses. One response per sheet of paper.
Identify a heavy feeling you want to release
Recall a moment in which you gave into peer pressure
What shot are you shooting this month?
Crumble up paper, and shoot till you score.
Hand the crumbled balls out to individuals at random to read aloud and respond
One person shares their response to a prompt and how they felt about the activity.
Modifications:
Sometimes I pair this activity with the game “Gotcha” also known as “Knock Out.” We play that game until we have a winner. Then we pass out the crumbled papers at random.
Praxis (why + theory):
Journaling is a mood modulator, and each piece of paper should be treated as a space for a journal entry.
As we move through our school-age years, the opportunities to reflect and share about ourselves is increasingly lessened. We are hardly given the time to sit still and decipher our emotions. This lack of dedicated reflection time obstructs our ability to learn and practice identifying the tension in our bodies and locating the source of our mental and/or emotional blockages. Without the time and this skill, we do not learn internal conflict resolution–how to reflect on our own experiences, address our own conflicts, and reframe for ourselves. Instead, we fill the gaps in our self-knowledge with ideologically informed, and therefore, distorted perceptions of ourselves and others.
When facilitated in conjunction with an assigned reading or text, this sort of play specifically, can facilitate “self-to-self, self-to-text, and self-to-world connections” (Kinloch 80). By sharing those connections aloud, the subsequent dialogue and self-exploration becomes more collaboratively and contextually informed. We become more expansive.
I used this exercise as a mutual aid project to support students with their final papers in a college English course. On one side of the paper students wrote a point of pride about their final paper–a feature of their paper they are most confident about and why; on the other side, they wrote a fear or question they are harboring about their final paper. We did the exercise as outlined. When students read other students’ anonymous confessions, the reader was tasked with sharing a resource or method that may be helpful to address the fear or answer the question. We wrote responses on the board, and created a study guide with helpful resources, affirmations, and frameworks for usage.