9 Exciting Team Building Activities for Students

Do you know the 2 main goals of team building activities?

Team building exercises are used to help improve productivity and motivation for students.

Incorporating bonding activities into the beginning of the year can help make your classroom run smoothly and work cooperatively from the start.

Continue reading to discover new team building activities for students and why they benefit your classroom so much.

Team Building Activities for Students

If you are a teacher, or any other type of educator, you may be searching for team building activities for students to do at the beginning of the year.

With school starting up soon, you can never be too prepared. Not only is it difficult for you to learn all of your student’s names in a short period of time, but students also struggle to remember the names of new classmates.

Another benefit of groups working together as a team is that is has shown to increase retention and learning for students, and leads to greater success.

Instead of having everyone stand up in front of the class to say their name, favorite color, and a fun fact, why not utilize bonding activities to help build relationships for the rest of the year?

Below are 9 of the most exciting team building activities that you can use in your classroom.

1. Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunts are an excellent choice for team building because everyone has a role in the game and tasks must be given to each individual.

Planning and working together is necessary if the students are motivated to win. This activity does not require much preparation time and can be a great opportunity to get students away from there desks after a busy time.

In order to prepare for this hunt, you will have to create a list of items that are distributed throughout the classroom or playground, and something to mark their lists with. If you are looking to challenge your students, you can incorporate riddles, equations, and questions from class in replace of naming items on the list.

2. Escape Room

Escape rooms are a new and fun activity that your students will likely get excited for.

If you have the ability, you could have a field trip to an Escape Room building, or some companies offer to come onsite. If you are unable to spend the money on this sort of trip, you can always create your own escape room in the classroom.

This is a perfect opportunity for your students to work together and solve various puzzles at the same time. In the escape rooms, everyone is working towards one main goal (escaping) even though each person may solve a small piece.

3. Save the Egg

If you aren’t afraid to make a little mess, save the egg is an excellent team-building activity that involves cooperation and creativity.

In this game, you will have to divide students into multiple groups, 5-6 people per group are recommended. Once you have your groups made, you will distribute eggs to the students. The students must then work together and come up with a way to keep the egg safe.

Students can put the egg in their created holder or can even make a landing pad. The point of this activity is to work together and avoid letting the egg break when dropped from several feet above the ground.

4. Zoom

Zoom would be a great bonding activity for all classes, especially language arts and writing.

This activity involves students to hold a picture or card labeled with an item or person. Students then go into a random order and must create a story together. The first person begins the story and includes what is on there card, and the next person continues with their item.

As the story builds, your students will need to get creative and help make the story flow even when they are piecing it together.

5. Minefield

If you are looking for a fun team-building exercise to do outside, the minefield activity is one that you should consider.

In this game, you will create some sort of obstacle course with random objects for the students to navigate through. The difficult part of the game? One member of each team is blindfolded and the other member must help them navigate through and be their “eyes.”

6. Battle of the Air Bands

This activity can be a lot of fun and get students motivated to work together and enjoy themselves.

In the battle of the air bands, you will have to break students up into groups where there must all choose a song. Once the song is chosen the students will have to work together to create a dancing or instrumental routine that they lip-sync to the music.

If you are wanting to include other classes, you can turn this into an entire competition with the teachers as judges.

7. Water Balloon Toss

If it’s a warm sunny day and you are looking for a bonding exercise for your class, you should consider playing water balloon toss.

Each student will have to find a partner and the will toss the balloon back and forth, taking a step away from each other with each throw. The game will become more challenging as the distance grows and teams will be eliminated if the balloon pops.

The last team standing wins!

8. Show and Tell

Show and tell was a popular activity for many people growing up but it has lost popularity within the schools.

Having students bring in an item that is meaningful to them and talking about it in class can help them with public speaking and learning more about one another. Each person gets there chance to talk and students can even ask questions.

9. Card Towers

Building card towers can be a fun activity for students and it doesn’t involve many materials.

All you will need to acquire is a couple of decks of cards to pass out to students. Each group must work together to try and build the tallest card tower out of the entire class. This game requires cooperation, attention to detail, and patience.

Bonds That Last

Utilizing team building activities for students not only help you and their peers remember each child’s name or interests, but it also benefits the classroom.

When students feel comfortable around each other, class participation is likely to rise and may improve learning. Taking some time out of the agenda to work on team building can make a dull day unforgettable.

There are many fun activities that you can do within the classroom, while others may require a field trip. As a teacher, you can encourage students to work together to help them in school but to also build lifelong friendships.

Be sure to check out our blog to find more articles, like this one, that helps bring people in your life together and improve your life satisfaction.