Surrender the ME for the WE

The grade 6's have started preparing for the exhibition. Collaboration, team work , cooperation play a crucial role in determining a group's success.

And so we all had a bit of fun in class while honing our collaborative spirit.

Task:
The students had to create a pyramid of plastic cups.

The challenge was to pick up the cups with strings and a rubber band. A noisy class it was.


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After the activity, we spoke of the the impediments that came along the way and strategies we used and to overcome them.

Sudiksha's reflection...

During the activity based on working as a group,I noticed how many problems would occur.I also noticed what did work and didn't work.While we were doing our activity,my group (Farah,Zarah,Isabella and I) we faced many problems such as not following the rules a few times by mistake, constantly dropping the cups and would sometimes not be working in a cooperative way which lead to a lot of stress and anger.But i did notice that our group was doing well on following each others instructions.The way we solved our conflicts was to just move on, and by that, I mean that we would just forget about it and not spend too much time discussing it  as it will waste our time and wouldn't be necessary.

Irene's reflection...

In this activity, we were tested on our all kinds of skills, but mostly our group working skills. The goal of the activity was to create a pyramid out of cups, with each person holding an end of the yarn that was tied to a rubber band. You couldn't touch the cups with your hand, or even hold the other end of the yarn to make it stable, which was very challenging for our group. Also, another thing that was challenging for our group was that when we were so close to completing the pyramid, somebody was so excited that they lost control of their mind, and let loose of the yarn that they were holding. What went wrong in during this activity is that everybody was irritated when someone made a mistake. The biggest thing I learned from this, is that not only my group work, and communication skills, but also that by being irritated at someone is not going to make a difference for your group. You are just wasting time, while others are doing well and not arguing.

Ideally, the students will have to use the vocabulary related to the skill sets.

I have highlighted this for them as shown below:

Hopefully, the students will be able to retrieve their learning today because:

1) they had fun and will remember the feeling associated with the learning.

2) they can go back to their reflections and recall how they resolved conflicts and dealt with stress and irritation during group work.