The Best Team Building Activity Ever

As part of our final day of class, I had my AVID students participate in a team building challange. I used some of the same activities with both my freshman and my sophmore/junior classes. We started with an alphabet search. I split the students into 6 teams and each team had 15 minutes to find an item that began with each letter of the alphabet. The items had to be personal so the students couldn't run around and get things off of other people. My students were pretty creative, using a pair of "optical lenses" for the letter O, Zyrtec alergy medicine for the letter Z, and a student named Yang Ming for the letter Y. However, my favorite team building activity of all time is something I called The Great Marble Race. I had used the activity with my freshman earlier in the year, but I knew that the older students would love it too. I had someone cut several pieces of PCV pipe in half lengthwise. I combined the 6 teams to form 2 teams. Each of the 2 teams had 6 pieces of PCV pipe and one marble. There goal was to get the marble to roll through the pipe while the team traveled from one end of the cafeteria to the other. The marble could not stop or drop onto the floor or the team had to start over. Since each team had about 11 members, each team member had to pass their PCV pipe after the marble passed through it to another team member and all team members had to participate. It's interesting to watch the students and see the leaders emerge. They all get so determined to win that they start to do a much better job of listening to each other and cooperating. I usually stop the group after the first few tries to debrief and discuss what the students see and hear and what they feel they could do better. After that I leave it all up to them.

If you try this, be sure that you have at least 30 minutes. 45-60 minutes might be better so that you can debrief during the activity and then reflect at the end. Be prepared, however, to do a lot of laughing.

TONIE Awards A Big Success

Let me preface this with the fact that I did not come up with this idea on my own. That said, this is the best AVID idea ever! I thank, whole-heartedly, the AVID coordinator who gave me the idea during one of our networking sessions (region 3, cohort B). You're an angel, whoever you are!

Ok, so here's the idea. Every month my students nominate a teacher that they feel has been particularly supportive. Each student who chooses to nominate a teacher writes an explanation of his/her nomination on an index card (5 x 7). I read them and choose the best explanations from each grade level. I then present the awards during announcements at our monthly staff meetings. Originally, the idea was that the students would present the awards to their teachers. However, getting on the agenda at our staff meetings can be difficult.

We had to give the award a name so I asked the students for suggestions. One student shouted out, "The TONY award!." He started laughing, but to his amazement, I thought it was a good idea. We just had to figure out what the letters in the word TONY would represent. It took us about a week, but we finally decided to spell it differently and came up with Teachers Officially Nominated for Inspiring Education (the for is silent). Feel free to steal or improve on this. I created a certificate, complete with a Lancer logo that I jacked off of our school website (I hope it's not copyrighted). I presented each teacher with a certificate and a $5 Starbucks (that is copyrighted) gift card.

Now for the good part. Your teachers will LOVE this! Ok, now the person who gave me this idea told me that our teachers would love getting the recognition and that the attitudes of the teachers toward the AVID program would change tremendously. I believed her, but I still didn't know. You won't understand until you see the looks on the faces of those tired and dedicated, but underappreciated people. They were so grateful that someone could see that they were doing good. It's funny because I just assumed that they knew that we knew. I will warn you. I did have to tell one our first award winners that he couldn't start crying. (That's right, I said "he"!) At the next staff meeting, when I stood up to present the awards, I heard someone say "Oh yeah! I forgot we get to do this!" I was just a little juiced.

Give this a try. It is so worth it. Make it your own and have fun!

CHS AVID & Cirque: Our 1st Real Field Trip

In my head, I've been planning this field trip since last year. My program didn't exist last year (a long story), but I first took my AVID class on a similar trip in 2005. Since we went to San Francisco last time, I thought we would go to the San Jose area this time. So here's what we did. We visited 2 colleges, Stanford University and Santa Clara University. I looked online before we went to see what the procedure would be to get a guided tour of the campuses. Here's tip #1: Stanford charges $75 for a private tour and you have to have a private tour for a group of 50 or more. Create your own tour. I had already planned to have the students participate in a scavenger hunt on one of the campuses so I came up with another activity for Stanford. My co-worker (and best friend) accompanied me on the field trip and she got in contact with one of our Cordova grads. He took our juniors to his 11am Sociology class. They found the class pretty interesting and amazing enough, it wasn't too overwhleming for them. We split the sophomores into 2 groups and gave them a list of things to ask students on campus about (see below).

They had to find out the following:

1. The best places to eat, both on campus and off
2. clubs and organizations on campus
3. what the dorms were like
4. traditional campus activities and events
5. the Stanford/Cal rivalry
6. where students go to get extra help
7. the best places on campus to study
8. upcoming events

We split the freshmen into 2 groups and gave each group a list of sights on campus to get information about. Go to Stanford's website and click on the Campus Sights link for a list of these places. All groups will present reports to the class when we return from the break.

We ate lunch on the Stanford campus and then headed for Santa Clara University. We split the students into 4 groups, gave each group a disposable camera and a list of things to take pictures of. I usually do these things on the fly so I'll try to recreate the list below.

1. a professer
2. a student studying
3. a college textbook
4. the music hall
5. a Santa Clara University athlete
6. the admissions office
7. someone wearing a Santa Clara University sweatshirt
8. the college mascot
9. any library
10. the student union
11. associated student services
12. the school newspaper
13. a coffee house
14. a cafeteria
15. a dormitory
16. a sign advertising an upcoming campus event
17. someone in a frat or sorority
18. a monument
19. the bookstore
20. the math, science, psychology, or history department

My group took a picture in front of the career center for bonus points since our career center coordinator was also a chaperone.

Our final stop on the trip was at the Grand Chapiteau in San Jose to see a matinee performance of Cirque du Soleil's Kooza. This was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. If you don't already know this, Cirque du Soleil shows consist of acrobats, jugglers, and clowns combined with a storyline. Cirque comes to Northern California every 2 years. This show was more than worth the $49.50/student that we paid. I'm hoping that my students will see that when a human being can do the things that they saw in the show, getting good grades and getting into college should be a piece of cake.

Ok, now for some tips.

Tip #2: Start raising money early. As I stated before, the cheapest tickets will run about $50/student and $55/adult. There is also a $50 service charge for services. Don't forget to purchase a ticket for your bus driver. I plan to start raising money next year for the following year's trip. With any luck we'll have 6 sections of AVID students and that's a lot of tickets.

Tip 3: Try to order your tickets at least 30 days in advance. If you do, you'll have 30 days to pay and you can pay by registered check. If not, someone will have to pay for the tickets on their credit card and then get reimbursed.

Tip #4: If you have students sit in on a lecture, leave enough time for them to see the campus too. I didn't really think that part through since I had already planned for the students to see 2 campuses.

Tip #5: Be ready to see your students in action. My squirrely little freshmen were amazing. The leaders really came out. I got to see relationships that I didn't know existed and I had conversations with students who barely speak at all in class.

This is my favorite field trip! Of course, I have yet to plan the trip to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.