Teamwork Mentor Text
Teamwork is one of the hardest and most important life skills to teach kids. So often I find that kids see teamwork as black and white- “I don’t like them, why should I have to work with them?” “My idea is better than anyone else’s” “It takes longer to talk to them so I just do it myself”. Thoughts like that cause kids to struggle to naturally work together so they need to be explicitly taught. With every group opportunity, when you are leading a group, when you are working with other teachers, each second is a teaching moment to model and reinforce their behavior to show cooperative teamwork.
I recently found a new wonderful book to teach teamwork!
Up The Creek not only offers an entertaining story about an adventure between friends, every event relates to teamwork! There are a lot of non examples of teamwork as the bear, beaver, and moose argue and struggle to canoe down the river from their arguing, not listening to each other, and making their own decisions without the team. The story provides its ultimate lesson when the characters realize they have to work together to get out of the problem they find themselves in and see how much fun they have using teamwork!
My students really connected with the experiences of the characters and developed a thorough understanding of what teamwork looks like, sounds like, and feels like from this story. The students also loved the details in the pictures and were making inferences left and right. There are also a lot of good stopping points throughout the story for predictions.
Below is a freebie of some activities I did with this book!
I started the lesson activating students’ prior knowledge by asking students what they know about teams and for examples of teams. Then I showed a variety of pictures and asked if it showed a team. The pictures included: basketball players, dogs running together, two friends climbing a mountain, football team, two kids holding hands, a cheerleading squad making a pyramid, and elephants drinking from a river.
Next, to apply the teamwork expectation list that the students created (help each other, listen, be nice, work together & share) we did a hands on activity!
SAVE FRED!
I explained to the story that Fred the worm like the bear, beaver, and moose was sailing along in his boat (the cup) when it flipped and his life preserver was under his boat! OH NO! The students are challenged to work in teams (I did groups of 3) to flip the boat back over and get Fred’s life preserver on him. The catch is that they cannot tough any of the material with their hands! They have to use paper clips to move the objects. I loved hearing all of the teamwork dialogue going on! Students worked so well with this challenge!
Other Activities
As a closure, I showed this animated video of birds using teamwork to talk about good and bad choices they show. Students have a lot of knowledge about teamwork at the end of this lesson, so this helped them to apply it to another situation and analyze choices.
