The Power of Teamwork!
Week 1 of the Nukko Lake Group
We recently started up our latest Connect Group at Nukko Lake Elementary School! This group is held biweekly, and the primary focus is to build social-emotional skills such as self confidence, trust, and empathy. The main goal of this group is to preserve the confident voices of children while strengthening their skills in assertively expressing their thoughts and feelings in ways that respect others, reject bullying behaviour, and reflect important values such as dignity, personal responsibility, empathy, cooperation, connectedness, and self respect.
Amy (my fellow BigsNBC mentoring coordinator and group leader) and I started the group with a quick introduction, and went over a group rules sheet. Following this, we played a quick game of would you rather as a warm up activity, and the kids loved it! One of the questions was “would you rather have an extra finger or an extra toe,” and one individual in the group stated they would rather have an extra toe so they can have better balance – we thought that was a pretty great response!
For this week’s activity, we had the kids pair off into partners, where they were instructed to build the tallest as possible tower out of spaghetti noodles, tape, and string. To make things even more interesting, the tower had to hold one marshmallow. The 3 groups had 10 minutes to complete this challenge, and in the end, all the groups’ towers were able to hold a marshmallow, which was pretty cool! The kids then asked if we could have an “earthquake” to see who’s could withstand it. Each team got to shake their own - they did a little shake at first, and then they literally rattled the tables the second time!
While we enjoyed snacking on marshmallows and fruit snacks, we had a great conversation about communication, teamwork and what other activities they want to do in future sessions.
We are so excited to be running this program, and we cannot wait to see the evolvement of the kids in the coming weeks.
Jaidyn, BigsNBC Mentoring Coordinator