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.