Teambuilding with Teens

This book is another one of my favourites.  Teambuilding with Teens:  Activities for Leadership, Decision Making, and Group Success, by Mariam G. MacGregor, has great activities for getting your class working together.  My copy is full of sticky notes that are now reminding me of so many good times in class!  Some of the ones I'm thinking of are "Handprints," "Body Map," "Becoming My Best," "My Whole Self," "Values Line," "Puzzle," "Heroes," "Fruit Salad," "Peace and Violence Webs," "Bank Robbery," "Community Action Plan," and "Letter to Myself."


A lot of this book is posted on Google books.  You can click on the picture of the book below to go to Google books and check it out.

"Fruit Salad" involved bringing in enough oranges for everyone in the class to have one.  Each student picks one and then studies it for several minutes.  Then everyone puts their oranges back into the bag and then tries to identify their original orange.  It is an interesting activity for introducing stereotyping.  "Bank Robbery" gets the class talking to each other to solve a mystery.  Depending on the size of your class each person gets 1 to 3 clues that they then have to tell each other to solve the mystery of who robbed the bank.  "Puzzle" has students working in pairs, sitting back to back, to piece together a jigsaw puzzle.  For the first 5 minutes the pairs try it, only the partner with the solution can speak, the partner trying to put the jigsaw together cannot.  For the next 5 minutes, the partner trying to solve the puzzle can ask questions, but the partner with the solution can only answer "yes" or "no."  During the final 5 minutes, they can speak freely with each other.

"Handprints" is easy to set up and it is a quick getting-to-know-you activity that worked well at the beginning of the semester.  Each student will need a piece of paper that they draw a large hand on.  They number the fingers 1 to 5 (thumb 1 - pinky 5).  Then they respond to the following statements inside each finger:

1. The person you admire most
2. Someone in life you think you can learn a lot from
3. Someone you know who has great leadership potential
4. The person in this group you are most looking forward to getting to know
5. The leadership trait or personality characteristic you most want people to use to describe you

Some "Talk About It," thoughts are:

• When people impact your life in a positive way, how do you let them know it?
• What similarities are there among the people who have impacted your life?
• How would you like others to think of your impact on their lives?
• What make a person's impact most memorable?