Peer group activities are always a learning experience at Perry Wellness Center, but we try to make them fun as well. A challenge is always more easily taken when there is friendly competition or an opportunity for laughter.

Recently, a morning group tackled an activity based on a network game show, Hangman Jeopardy. Certified peer specialist Victoria Malerbi led the group in rounds of the game, turning it into a vocabulary exercise on words relevant to health and wellness.

If you’re not familiar with the game, a mystery word is selected, and the only information the other players have is how many letters are in the word. As letters to form the word are offered, a wrong guess leads to an addition to a drawing of a stick figure being hanged. If the drawing is completed before the word is guessed, then the figure is done for!

In the recent group, Victoria suggested that words be selected that related to fruit, vegetables, and exercise. She explained, “The suggesting of words makes our peers think about what we do and what we eat at Perry Wellness Center.”

As the suggested words grew longer, so did players’ excitement, particularly when it came to selecting words that might stump the group. Luckily, no players ended up hanged from the Hangman tree, as they were successful in their final guesses.

“This kind of vocabulary exercise is fun and educational for our peers and staff,” noted PWC founder and CEO Stuart Perry. “I enjoy seeing peer faces as they solve a problem.” Sometimes solving problems in real life is not as easy as those on a sheet of paper. But exercises such as these help teach basic problem solving skills, from learning not to give up too quickly to thinking out different solutions in one’s head. So who said learning can’t be fun?

In the photo above, Victoria Malerbi leads a group class in a cooperative game of Hangman Jeopardy.