Friday Favorites - Community Building Activities

Every Friday this summer I am sharing some of my favorite things with you! The month of August is focused on back to school.

Check out past Friday Favorites...
PD Books
Read Alouds
Kids' Favorite Series
Book Studies
Tech Apps

Math Activities

Reading Activities

PBL Activities
Teaching Supplies
Back to School Books

I'm excited to share some of my favorite community building activities with you today! Many of these I actually did this past week which was the first week of school. I love team building activities and think it's important that we really focus on building that community the first few weeks of school because it makes everyone feel more comfortable.

Bucket Filling - Such a great book and a great activity to continue all year long. This book talks about how we all have an invisible bucket above our head. When good things happen, drops go in the bucket and our bucket becomes fuller. When bad things happen or someone says something mean to you, drips go out over you bucket and your bucket starts to empty. It's a great visual for kids. After reading, I always explain our bucket filling area. The students can write positive bucket filling notes to each other and put them in their buckets (Ziploc bags). Great way to promote positivity and kindness!

Find Someone Who - I don't have a picture of this one, but there are many versions out there. This is a great first week activity that allows students to get to know one another and find things that they might have in common with others.  For example, find someone who has an older sibling.  Great activity for early in the school year.

Cup Tower Challenge - This activity is all over Pinterest. You give each team the same number of cups, a time limit, and their goal is to build the tallest tower possible with the cups. I love activities like this that focus on the kids working together for a common goal!

Dice Challenge - This is a Minute to Win It Game that I changed up a bit. This activity is again done in teams.  One student holds the craft stick while the other students stack dice on the end.  They have one minute to get as many dice as possible on the craft stick. At the end of the minute, the team with the most dice on the stick win! I will say I tried this out and it is not as easy as it looks! Requires a lot of coordination, but the kids had fun working on it!

Paper Chain Challenge - Another activity I found on Pinterest.  Again, students are in teams so it's giving them a chance to work together and work on problem solving skills. Each group got one piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a glue stick. The challenge was to build the longest paper chain using only one piece of paper! I was quite impressed with this group below - they made their chain quite long!!!

Snap Cube Challenge - I found the Snap Cube cards at Keeping My Kiddo's and Kinder's Busy... you can find them...here.  Then, I had students work with their team to build all 9 snap cube figures. They then had to take a picture of each creation. The first team finished with all 9 won! 

Thank you for checking out my favorite community building activities. Since Summer is coming to an end so is my Friday Favorite Blog Post Series - but stay tuned for many more blog posts and teaching ideas!