Grade 4 Report

Team Building Challenges

“Teamwork makes the dream work” - Helen Keller

“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much” – John C Maxwell

Last week the Grade 4 teachers organised some fun team building activities! They were a great opportunity for students to work on their communication skills and ability to work with others in challenge situations. Each day the students were mixed into groups and work with a different Grade 4 teacher. It was great to see the students working with people from outside of their close friendship groups on a variety of problem-solving activities.

The activities were lots of fun and definitely required our school values of resilience, responsibility, respect and in the end thankfully resulted in plenty of learning success! You might like to try some at home as a family!

The activity on Monday was a Paper Tower Challenge. Each group was given 20 pieces of paper and needed to build the tallest tower. The catch was that they couldn’t use sticky-tape, glue, staples or paper clips! They tried rolling, folding, twisting and one group even built paper cubes to stack. Groups started by coming up with a plan and had to restart their towers many times! 

Tuesday afternoon involved a Domino Challenge! Students could also use Jenga blocks and tried to include different features such as a bridge, stairs and an archway. This task was a bit more familiar to students and again, they had to restart a few times when their Dominoes would accidentally come crashing down!

The third and final activity was a Cup Challenge! Each group were given 6 plastic cups, an elastic band and some string. The challenge was to use the elastic band and strings to move the cups into different designs. They catch was that they couldn’t use their hands and the final task involved no talking. Some groups were successful in building all 4 designs!

Together Everyone Achieves More

Here are some of the students’ thoughts about the challenges!

• It was really hard but I had a lot of fun. My favourite was the cup stacking – Matilda
• I thought it was fun. I really liked the cup stacking challenge. Thankyou teachers for organising it! - Eamon
• I loved the cup challenge because you had to do it in a team and be resilient and control your anger when someone accidentally knocked it over – Isha
• You had to communicate with your group! It was very hard! – Freya
• The cup challenge was challenging but fun and I enjoyed the dominoes and paper challenge too – Victoria
• I liked how you could be in groups with people you might not know very well but it was fun and we should do it again – Rhea
• I like the dominoes – it was fun watching them fall – Cora
• Stacking the cups was my favourite team building challenge - Huan
• I loved the paper tower stacking because everyone was patient and showed resilience if we had to start again – Amy
• I like the cup challenge. It was both easy and hard - Xuan
• The cup challenge was so fun – Cross
• Stacking the cups was my favourite – Huan