Collaboration Challenge

   I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that my first-grade students have a hard time working together sometimes. Similarly to my own children at home, there can be a lot of arguing, hurt feelings, and tattling. In order to boost our team-building and collaboration skills, I decided to implement a problem-solving activity from the following website (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  . The activity called for giving the students several different materials and a task to solve using the materials. I didn’t have all of the materials suggested, so I had to eliminate a few. This is what I gave to each group of 3-4 students: Cotton Balls, string, plastic cups, clothespins, tape, popsicle sticks, and paper clips. I then charged the students with the task of making a device to move a stuffed animal from one end of the room to the other without letting the stuffed animal touch the ground and without the students touching the stuffed animal with any part of their body.

  As soon as I announced the activity, the students were thrilled. They were so excited that they didn’t even seem to mind that I wouldn’t let them choose their own groups. I told the students to find a place to work with their group, choose a stuffed animal from our bin, and then plan out their design before taking any materials. Some groups chose to draw their designs on paper and others just talked about their ideas.

  I didn’t put a time limit on the challenge and didn’t turn it into a competition, and I think that this was key for the activity going as smoothly as it did. Because there was no pressure of time, the students did a great job of collaborating with each other, compromising, and troubleshooting their ideas. When students finished the challenge, several of them asked if they could help the other groups by giving them suggestions, sharing ideas, or even just cheering them on. After the activity was over, I asked each student to reflect on the experience and write what was the most challenging part of the activity and why. The students then posted their writing on Seesaw, along with a photo of their device.

  One stumbling block that I experienced on my end was not giving each group a stuffed animal that was the same size. Some groups chose a small stuffed animal, which was easier to transport across the room than a larger one. Overall, however, the students absolutely loved this activity and are already asking when they can do it again. 

   I have to add a photo of my favorite device (shh, don't tell the other groups!). These students finished last because they spent a bunch of time creating a zip line by taping pieces of string together and attaching the ends at either side of the room. Although their device would have worked just fine without the zip line, I think we can all agree that the added effort made a lasting impression! 

   I'm sure this team building activity could be adapted for all grade levels. Give it a try and let me know how you modified the challenge to make it work for you and your students! 

Mystery Number Collaboration Activity Featuring the Marco Polo App!

A few months ago we learned about this great game called Mystery Number in one of our EdTech classes. It's a competitive game like Battleship that can be played with either two people or two groups of people against each other. Each team chooses a mystery number and the other team comes up with yes/no questions to ask in order to figure out what the other team's mystery number is. The first team to guess correctly wins!

We played this game earlier in the year with another first-grade class in our school and we sent messages back and forth written on a whiteboard. The students loved it and immediately asked when we would play it again. In order to give this game a tech revamp, I asked my husband’s cousin (who teaches in Wisconsin) if she would be interested in having her class participate in the activity with us, and she happily accepted the offer! I e-mailed her written instructions for how to play the game and sent her the same number grid that my students were going to use so the experience would be the same for both classrooms. We both played a practice round with our own students that day before connecting to play against each other.

We used the Marco Polo video messaging app to connect our two classes. I decided to use a video messaging app instead of a video chat tool such as Skype because our classes needed time to discuss which questions we wanted to ask the other class to help us guess their mystery number, and we didn’t want the other class to hear our discussions or accidentally discover what our mystery number was. Every time I received a new message I held my phone under the document camera so that the rest of the class could watch the video and listen. Each of the students in the class got a turn to either ask a question or respond to a question from the other class, which they loved!

The students were immediately thrilled when I told them that we were going to play the mystery number game again. When I told them that we would be connecting with a class from another school and another state, several resounding “WOOOOAH”s could be heard throughout the room. We got our supplies ready, chose our mystery number, and came up with the first question we wanted to ask the other class.  

The other class asked us a question early on that really narrowed down what our mystery number could be. The students were discouraged by this and one student asked, “What if we don’t win??” to which another student replied, “Well we can always play again another time!” Every time we received a message from the other class the students would erupt with excitement. Our instructional aid was scheduled to leave our classroom before the game was over, but she kept popping back into the room whenever she could because she was so enthralled with the students’ reactions and the excitement of the game. She said to me, “I can’t believe how much fun they’re having I need to see who wins!!”

The end of the game was very tense (in a good way!) The other class had their choices eliminated down to two numbers, and so did we. The other class asked us “Does your number have 7 in the ones place?” and we knew that they had the right answer, because our number was 77. The kiddos decided that, even though the other class’s number could be one of two numbers left on our number grid, we needed to just guess since it was our turn to ask a question and the other class would make their correct guess next, winning them the game. We took a class vote and decided to guess 66. When the other class responded that we had guessed correctly, the students’ cheers could be heard throughout the entire first floor!

This game perfectly aligns with our curriculum. Although our pacing guide has us explicitly teaching greater than/less than and place value at the beginning of the year, they are important skills to revisit throughout the year to help the students build a strong foundation of number sense that they will carry with them throughout their school career and beyond.

Overall, I highly recommend trying this out in your classroom! It's very minimal set-up, it uses a free app, and your students will have the time of their lives!