4th of July Bilingual Blog Hop - My Take on Group Work

Teaching Children to Productively Work Together

Having children working on groups/teams well requires a lot of work. It does not suffice to assign a task and then expect them be masters at it. Let’s face it, as adults we sometimes have a hard time working with certain individuals (for whatever reason that may be), so for students to be able to work productively together one must model and teach what is expected.

In the past, I have taken the time to model and explain what it means to work well together. We start by creating a 2 column chart titled: Working as a Team: What it looks like/What it sounds like. This is a great opportunity for me to gauge and see where my students are, what thoughts they have, and plan for what my next steps will be.

After this (and this activity I LOVE), I randomly group my students in teams of 5 (I use the Teacher’s Pick App – no wooden sticks here!!!). The activity gives me a great picture of my students: who is not afraid of talking, expressing opinions, or taking the lead as well as who is more reserved). I borrowed this from The Science Gal. There she not only goes in detail about the task but also elaborates on team work. This is a great beginning of the year activity that would work amazingly well as an ice-breaker too.

As the days pass, we revisit the chart we created adding/deleting things as we may deem necessary. I usually start the year with math partners as I find that teaching pairs to work together is a bit easier than teaching groups of 4 or 5 to do so. By the second week of school we move into grouping for projects that may require more time (1 or 2 weeks maybe?). Here I enjoy presenting different tasks and discussing the different roles one can take as a member of a group.

The following group of cards are ideal for holding students accountable for their work, yet a word of CAUTION – you need to model the behavior and what each ‘job’ looks like in order for it to work. Just handing cards to students will not work – it will be CHAOS. For this 4th of July Blog Hop the cards will be available for free at my TpT Store. Make sure you grab them before is too late.