Stress Discovery Channel: Animal Clue Challenge

The "Signs and Symptoms of Trauma" poster depicts animals in different emotional/behavioural states. On the border of the game board, you can find different characteristics that can be linked to animals. Each characteristic has a coloured border. The characteristics with the same-coloured border, belong to the same category. The icons are depicting (starting from top left clockwise):

• Green = habitat: mountains, desert, grassland, jungle, cave, river/lake, forest, beach, sea, ice, house, barn, meadow
• Pink = diet: plants, meat
• Yellow = biorhythm: day, night
• Orange = features: beak, fur, scales, claws, feathers, shell, horns, hooves, sharp teeth, 4 paws, 2 paws, no paws
• Grey = colours: spots, stripes, multicolour, white, grey, black, blue, purple, pink, brown, green, yellow, orange, red
• Light blue = size: big, medium, small
• Brown = locomotion: crawling on land, jumping, climbing, flying, walking on land, digging holes, swimming
• Red = strength: weak, strong
• Blue = speed: fast, intermediate, slow

The centre of the poster depicts different animals with different stress reactions. The animals depicted and their stress responses are:

• Fight (chipmunk, eagle, lions, kangaroos, chimpanzee, chickens)
• Flight (turtle, hedgehog, sloth, cheetah)
• Freeze (bear, ducks, gorilla, rhino, flamingo)
• Fawn (dog, camels, peacocks, deer, otters, donkey)
• Other (bison, wolf, snake, polar bear, pigeon, shark, meerkat, giraffe, bunny, toucans, owl, cat, black panther, koala, llama, panda, red panda, lemur, ostrich, penguin, horse, argali, elephant, fox, skunk, cuttlefish)
• No stress reaction (bat, red crab, ladybug, mouse, killer whale, seal, eagle ray, chameleon, red frog, purple frog, purple hermit crab, parrot, scarlet ibis, crocodile, sea star)

This game is part of the Trauma-Informed Youth Work toolkit, which is designed to create a safe, supportive environment for all participants by acknowledging the impact of trauma on young people and fostering trust and empowerment. By incorporating activities that use indirect methods to explore emotions and behaviours, the toolkit makes sensitive topics more accessible and less intimidating, especially for younger audiences. The teamwork aspects of these activities foster collaboration and support, aligning with trauma-informed principles. This approach promotes healing, resilience, and positive development in every youth engaged, while emphasizing emotional awareness and understanding.

• For a higher level of difficulty, give the designated players a limited number of bottle caps or pawns per turn, 5 for example. In this way, you can also exercise the ability to prioritize, extract essential information or identify that information that can be implicitly conveyed through other information. Different motivational rules can also be introduced, such as: for 3 correct consecutive guesses / for fair-play attitude, the team is entitled to 1 extra bottle cap or pawn per turn.

• For a small group: If you have few players joining the game or players coming and going (and that makes it difficult to make/keep teams), the facilitator could be the one placing some bottle caps/pawns on the side categories and players should find as many animals as possible with those characteristics they can.

• Depending on the different variables of the group (age, length of time working together, level of development and confidence, etc.) we can also consider alternative ways of exploring the poster:

* Instead of using the clues on the border of the poster to guess animals, the players act out the behaviours or characteristics of different animals while their teammates guess the animal being portrayed.

* Create a set of cards with pictures of animals and their corresponding emotional/behavioural states on the poster. Place the cards face down and take turns flipping them over to find matching pairs of animals and emotions.

* Provide a collection of animal pictures along with emotion words or phrases. Participants work together to match each animal with the emotion they think it represents, discussing their reasoning as a group.

* Assign each player an animal and ask them to role-play the behaviours and emotions of that animal. Encourage them to express themselves through movement, sounds, and facial expressions.

*Have players create stories or narratives featuring animals as characters, incorporating different emotional themes or situations related to trauma and resilience, coping, and support within their stories.

• Strengthen observation and deduction abilities
• Explore and enhance animal knowledge in a fun way
• Develop teamwork and communication skills