momgineer: cooperative play

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Back to School STEM - Team Builders and Activities

Back to school time can be filled with stress, for both you and the students. With the transitions and demands of a new school year, you might not think you have time to do something that seems like an end of the year treat with your new students. While going over procedures and expectations is on the top of your list, I hope you will consider using some unique team-building and ice-breaking activities with your students. They will help build trust and cooperation and start off the new year on the right foot! Watch the video or read on:

A Tower STEM Challenge

One of the most fun back to school STEM challenges is the No Peeking challenge! If you have ever tried a STEM challenge with your students before, there is a good chance it involved tower building. Whether you used cups, blocks, marshmallows and spaghetti, or some other material, this is a very common starter STEM challenge.

Back to school STEM gives it a slightly different twist! You can see in the image above what that is. That's right, for this challenge, the builder will be blindfolded (or have their eyes shut!). That means the rest of the team needs to tell the builder how and where to build the tower using verbal commands. Tower building has never been so difficult, or more fun!

There are several modifications for this one but I know it's one your students will be talking about for weeks! Here's another action shot with a variation (behind the back tower building - this is not only a mental challenge but a physical challenge as well):

Brain Busting STEM Challenge - Memory Dash

Another fun cooperative challenge that will also stretch your students' brains? Memory Dash!

Memory Dash requires the students to plan, in a team, how they can recreate a pre-made structure. The catch? They need to commit the structure to memory first, then instruct the rest of their team on how to build it (without helping in the actual building). It sounds simple but it can be extremely challenging. Each student can then have a chance being the "instructor."

The plan is actually quite important, which they will quickly realize the first time through the challenge. Subsequent attempts will go much more smoothly as they tweak their communication and assembly process! Tip: keep the structure simple and have each team recreate the same one. Use simple manipulatives like cubes, dice, etc. Time the challenge with a stopwatch or timer. Your students will hopefully improve their assembly times with each attempt, using what they learned from previous attempts.

This challenge can give students a great perspective into what your job is like as a teacher. Because one of the team members needs to instruct the rest of the team, they need to make sure they not only communicate clearly, but that the rest of the team is actually listening to what they are saying and then following through on it!

Back to School STEM Pencil Challenge

In addition to the team builders included in the Back to School STEM resource I put together, there are also individual challenges that can be done when you need to take a brain break, or if you need tasks for early finishers. One of these is even practical for your classroom: the Pencil Keeper Challenge!

Do your students lose track of where their pencils are? They may be more apt to keep them where they belong if they have a device they've made on their own. They can take pride in it every time they use it! You can also have them design pencil keepers to host pencils in various parts of the classroom if you'd like! I hope these give you some ideas of ways you can start off the new school year with STEM! If you are looking for more ideas or recording pages for these and more ideas, please consider visiting:

Pin to come back later:

Back to School STEM Icebreakers and Team-Building Activities - Meredith Anderson Momgineer

Have a great school year!

*Photos by Snapshots by Amy

hot day water play

We have been having a heat wave in the northeast, so have been spending a lot of time in and around water to cool down. While the water table is always a favorite, I thought I'd share some ideas to make it even more fun. Ideas of things to add:

Turkey basters or eyedroppers
Measuring cups
Empty bottles
Pop tubes - we like to extend and connect them
Squirting toys


funnels

turkey baster, funnel, pop tubes

Hosing off the deck.

Figuring out how many cups fill the bottle.

encouraging imaginary play

Imaginary play is not my forte. I don't know if H&F just didn't fall far from my imagination-less tree, or if they would just generally rather do other things, so I try to encourage imaginary play but am always looking for more ideas. One thing that kept them both happily occupied for an hour recently (which is basically unheard of in our house!) is the creation of a small town. We have this really cute play rug from IKEA, which you would think would get lots of imaginary play time. However, it rarely does. This is basically the same idea as a play rug, but with kid input, and it can be recycled later and a new one made another time.

I helped get them started but they really took off with it and it was so nice to see them playing together so well and creating all these different scenarios for their animals, cars, and trains. There are gardens, houses, parks, parking lots, lakes and pools, an airport complete with a helicopter launchpad, some train tracks, a dinosaur island, and a strawberry lake, which has strawberries instead of water. With how many pounds of strawberries H&F consume each week, I am not surprised they would come up with a lake made entirely out of strawberries!