Back to School Team Building

I sometimes can't believe how much planning goes into the first week of school. Because I believe that building the classroom community must happen before getting heavily into the curriculum, planning for this past week was quite time consuming! Some of the activities I did to build community stemmed from an inservice we had, where Dave Burton presented. In a nutshell, Dave Burton believes in affective education and presented us with many ice-breakers and team-building activities, many of which we, as teachers, did!

One activity dealt with building a bridge. My team had to have the exact same bridge as the other team. To do this, we had to communicate verbally, without ever showing our structure. I decided that this was a great lesson to do (with some modifications) with my own kids to teach the importance of teamwork and communication.

Here, the kids are working together to create a structure that resembles the other team's building,

Here, the kids are communicating with one another in hopes to build the same structures.

This was such an incredible moment! The groups realized that when they finally revealed their structures, they were so similar. They discussed how they thought that their communication and teamwork was great!

 As a closure to this activity, we discussed how lessons learned in this building activity can be related to our school day. The kids were able to make the connection that without good teamwork and communication, work will not get done as well.

It was a great first week. I feel lucky to be working as a 3rd grade teacher at Mattison Avenue ES.