Being a team player is an important part of working in the corporate culture. The teachers and parents need to foster team-building among the children when they are growing up. There are a couple of reasons which we will talk about now in the article.
Encouraging Team–Building Among Children
While textbooks educate students, one cannot learn all life skills through books. Teamwork activities help children in the following aspects:
- It helps children to get along with their peers. They have fun, and chemistry takes place among them. They learn the skills required to communicate, listen, trust and support each other effectively. They learn to collaborate, solve problems and make decisions.
- Working in a team stimulates brain activity. Children are curious to know about the world while growing up. The group activities help children to learn to brainstorm. A pool of ideas is generated among children through such activities. That is to say; teamwork helps children in creative thinking.
- They learn how to give directions clearly, question assumptions.
The pandemic has affected the development of curious children, their brains developing, and they are learning to socialize and get a sense of the world. Therefore, when things are coming back to normal, and schools are reopening, parents and teachers need to enforce team activities among children.
Here are some activity ideas that you can go for to build teamwork among children:
- Keep it Real – Divide a class into teams. Give a situation to the team and ask the groups to think about it within a given time. It will help them to learn to solve problems. You can add other parameters if you like, further complicating it, adding to the brainstorm.
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Some activities which are similarly participated are –
- The Worst-Case Scenario – Children are given examples such as – being lost on a deserted island, and then they are asked to carry ten items with them.
- It’s a Mystery – This game allows teams to solve hypothetical mystery cases upon communicating among themselves.
- Detective – This game is similar to “It’s a Mystery”, the difference being here one person has to solve the case and not the whole matter. All members but one from the team become part of the plan, and the team leader heads the strategy. The one person remaining is the Detective who solves the case.
- Children can use gestures while participating in the game, and it activates cooperation skills and both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication.
- Don’t Wake the Dragon – This is an ideal activity for young children. In this activity, children are asked to accomplish a task without waking the dragon. If the job is over while the dragon is asleep, the team wins.
- Bob the Builder – The teacher gives an assignment to the teams. The team members work together to build something great – e.g., the students are given toothpicks and marshmallows, and they are asked to make the biggest structure with them.
- Storytime – The teacher gives a picture of a place or object or an emoji to each child and then starts the story with an introduction to which every child follows, adding a narrative each until the last child. This game promotes creative collaboration where all the students get to take part.
Conclusion
Textbooks cannot teach Teamwork skills, but active participation in group activities can. These skills are required to survive in a real-life scenario. In the pandemic times, the schools were closed.
