Creating a Team Centered Classroom

This is my second year teaching 6th grade math at the junior high. I have found that teaching at the junior high level is a lot different that teaching 2nd and 3rd grade. My 2nd and 3rd graders loved to share their answers. They didn't care if they had the right or wrong answer, they wanted to go up to the board or document camera and share their work. Sixth graders aren't always so excited about sharing. I think as students get older they get this stigma about math, that there is only one correct way to solve a math problem. I've found that having this stigma will cause my students to shut down sometimes. I wanted my students to start this year with a different attitude. I wanted my students to know that it's okay to fail, that's where we learn the most! On the first day of school I showed my students the "Keep Moving Forward" clip from the movie, Meet the Robinsons.

My students loved this clip! I actually had a student say to me the other day, "It's okay that I didn't get the right answer. I just have to keep moving forward." Yes! That's exactly right.

I spent my first week of school giving little bits of motivation like the video above, along with a lot of team building activities. One of my students' favorite activities was "Saving Sam". My students loved these activities so much, they asked me if we were going to do activities like this all year. I will definitely be posting more team building activities as the year goes on.

Saving Sam is an activity where the students have to get a gummy worm through a gummy lifesaver without using their hands. The only thing they can use is a paperclip. You can get this activity as a FREEBIE from my TpT store.

Here are some of my students trying to Save Sam.

After the students were all successful at Saving Sam, we talked about how they were all problem solvers. They were all able to save Sam without anyone telling them how to do it. We tied this back into the "Keep Moving Forward" theme. We discussed that even if the students dropped Sam and had to start over, they didn't give up. We related this to math that even when the students get a wrong answer, they should go back and try it again.
We've been in school for 8 weeks now and I can see the time spent on team building activities at the first of the year has really set up my classes to work well with teams. My students work really well at helping each other and problem solving together.