The Human Knot: Team Building Exercise

Team work is always a good thing to teach your students, and the Human Knot is the perfect way to get the point across. Another good thing about this activity, from an ESL perspective, is that it is also great for teaching your students prepositions. Students will link hands (in a special way) to form a human knot, which they then will have to discuss, twist and contort their way out of, without breaking any links.

Objective: To teach the students to work as a team to make and then untangle a human knot. They will do this by conversing what they want to do in English using  prepositions.

Keywords: Over, under, into, out, through, around, across. 

Starter: Begin the class by showing the students the prepositions. A good way to explain these is by using a stool as a prop to demonstrate the above keywords. Step OVER the stool, hold the stool above your head "I am UNDER the stool, Put your arm THROUGH the legs section of the stool etc. Continue to teach and drill the students like this for 5-10 minutes.

Activity: Just before starting the activity, call 5 students to come up and stand in a circle with you, you will need them to listen and then help you to show what to do to the rest of the class. 6 people stand in a circle and they must now link hands but before they do you need to explain the rules to be followed to make this work. If they don't follow the rules they will get two circles or a knot that can't be untied.

Rules To Form The Human Knot:

• The knots can be formed with groups of 6, 8 or 10 people. 6 being easy, 8 -  medium difficulty and 10 people -  very difficult.


• You can't link hands with the person next to you.


• You can't  link both hands with the same person.


• You must start the knot by first connecting right hands and second connecting left hands. If one right hand holds someones left hand...it's not going to work. So get every one in the circle to first put their right hands in and once they are joined, then put their left hands in.

Once the knot has been formed, students need to start to discuss what they need to do to get out of this tie. For example, Joe might say "Bill go under my hand, and Lisa go over here. The students can lift their arms high for students to walk under or all squat low to the floor so students can climb over. It is important not to break hands and rejoin them in an unfair way, but make sure the students know they can re-arrange their grips so as not to twist and hurt their wrists, shoulders etc.

Extra Notes:

• Make sure the students start in groups of 6. This is the easiest knot to get out of. Once they have completed that move on to a group of 8 which is a lot more challenging. If they can get out of the 8 people knot, try a group of 10. A knot consisting of 10 people is really very difficult to escape from, but it can be done.


• Emphasize to the students to take care and be careful not to hurt themselves or others.


• If you find you have some time to spare, you can run some time trial competitions or have some races between the groups to see who is the quickest or can finish first for 6, 8 and 10 person knots.


• You really have to check that the students use as much English as they can, in all the excitement it's easy for them to revert to only using the native language if left unchecked.


• Another great exercise to finish up the class with is to assign one student to each group who will verbally direct them (as an onlooker) on how to untie their knot.

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