Getting the Year Started with Team Building

Welcome Back!  We were so excited to get the school year started, especially since we had such a fun first week back planned for our 5th graders.  Part of our plan was team building activities.

Working cooperatively and communicating with a group will be an important skill for our 5th graders this year.

Circle the Circle - the entire 5th grade created two large circles. Students passed the hula-hoop around the circle while having their hands connected. 

We discussed strategies that worked well for the group. This was important because eventually we added four hula-hoops to our circle.

Once we were ready we moved some additional team building challenges! We continued to use the hula-hoops, this time we created small groups for "Helium Hula-Hoop".  Teams could only touch the hula-hoop with the sides of their fingers (i.e the pads of their pointer fingers pointing each other). This was one of our requirements because students also couldn't hook their fingers around the hula-hoop. A big part of this task was relying and working with others to be successful, and communication. 

Most groups initially had the hula-hoop rise instead of lower until students began working together to figure this task out.