Teamwork is necessary for most aspects of life. We use it when we cooperate with family members, work together with others at school and work, spend time with friends, and interact with neighbors and the greater community.
How can you teach your kids teamwork? The earlier they understand group dynamics and appreciate the richness of working together, the more opportunities they’ll have to learn it. Here we’ve compiled tips and activities for you to use.
Key Takeaways
- Teamwork helps develop important social skills like empathy, problem-solving, trust, and communication.
- The best way to teach teamwork is to live it. Reading books, modeling teamwork, using precise language, giving choices, and playing games are all excellent tools for teaching teamwork.
- Being part of a sports team teaches kids skills they can bring into other parts of their life.
Table of Contents
- Why Is Teamwork Important?
- Tips for Teaching Teamwork
- How Schools Teach Teamwork
- Activities for Teaching Teamwork
Why Is Teamwork Important?
Your child will work with teams again and again in their lifetime. Whether they’re collaborating with classmates, playing on a sports team, planning a party with friends, or going on a trip with family, they’ll need to understand and embrace teamwork.
Teamwork taps into a wide variety of social skills such as patience, compromise, problem-solving, and empathy. As your child learns these skills, they carry them into personal and future professional relationships, increasing the likelihood of their success and happiness.
How you teach your kids the skills that are integral to teamwork matters. Being intentional in the way you approach it and what activities you use will help you succeed.
Tips for Teaching Kids Teamwork
Try these suggestions to help your kids learn teamwork.
Have Fun While You Teach
Your kids will have fun if you have fun! Collaborating with a team to accomplish a goal can be exciting—ideas fly, people build off each other’s thoughts, and goals get realized. This kind of energy can be invigorating and infectious.
So the next time you and your kids collaborate on something, try to keep the mood light. Make sure they know that nothing is set in stone and all ideas have potential.
Model Teamwork
How do you teach kids teamwork? Model it. Our kids watch us more than we know and they often mimic how we behave. Be conscious of the ways you participate in groups when your child is present (and even when they’re not!).
Use Books to Teach Kids Teamwork
Reading stories together reinforces your teaching. Your child can step into a character’s shoes, see their point of view, and comfortably recognize where they might fit into the story, which helps them develop a sense of empathy. Don’t be afraid to read them again and again!
Use Precise Language
Let’s say you’re the coach of a soccer team. You want the kids to play a scrimmage. If you simply tell them, “Work as a team out there!” they may have no idea what to do.
But if you give them specific instructions, like “You three need to work together to keep the ball out of the goal and you three need to dribble the ball down the field,” they know exactly what their role is within the group.
Give Choices
Give your child the opportunity to take ownership of their part of a team effort by giving them choices whenever you can. Having a say makes kids feel invested in the team effort because they’ve contributed their ideas.
Take the Long View
Learning how to teach kids teamwork takes time. Try to be aware of the learning curve your kid is on and see if you can break down the skills you’re teaching into smaller bites. Celebrate each small success.
How Schools Teach Teamwork
Teamwork is especially important for kids when they’re in school. One way some schools teach teamwork is with the jigsaw method. This method of teaching gives each child the opportunity to become an expert in one aspect of a larger lesson so they can teach what they learn to the rest of their peers.
A teacher might divide their class into six different groups, each group studying a different aspect of the ocean, for example. Once they understand the material, the groups come back together and fit their newly acquired knowledge together like a jigsaw puzzle to make a whole.
Activities for Teaching Teamwork
Doing is always better than telling. These are some fun team-building activities that are designed to strengthen collaboration and cooperation skills.
Physical Games
If your kid moves their body while learning a new skill, they’re more likely to retain it. Physical activity helps our brains consolidate information.
Untangle the Knot
What You Need
- A group of at least 5 kids
Directions
- The kids stand in a circle facing each other.
- Everyone raises their right hand and links it with another person’s hand. Participants are not allowed to link with the people standing next to them.
- Everyone repeats the movement with their left hand.
- One at a time, the kids untangle themselves by stepping over, under, around, and between the linked hands.
- When everyone is standing in a circle again, they’ve ALL won the game!
Scavenger Hunt
What You Need
- At least 2 kids
- Piece of paper
- Pen
- Clipboard
Directions
- Make a list of the objects you want the team to find. If your child is too young to read, you can draw pictures of the objects.
- Give the team the list and ask them to find the objects and circle the words or pictures when they find them.
- Emphasize that the object is to work together as a team.
Brain games
Problem-solving, clear communication, and strategic thinking rise to the top when you play creative thinking games with your child.
Feelings Charades
What You Need
- At least 2 kids
- Paper
- Pen or pencil
- Bowl
Directions
- Write down different emotions on individual pieces of paper and put them in a bowl.
- Participants take turns choosing a piece of paper and silently acting out the emotion written on it for the others to guess.
- If your child can’t read, you can draw faces that show the emotions instead.
Role Reversal
What You Need
- At least 3 kids
Directions
This game can be played in a variety of ways.
- Give kids a scene to act out (for example, building a house, going on a safari) and assign each person a role.
- When they’ve acted out the scene once, have them do it again, only this time in different roles.
- Do this as many times as the kids want.
- Talk together about what each child learned each time they played a different part.
Story Chain
What You Need
- At least 4 kids
- Paper (optional)
- Pencils or pens (optional)
Directions
- Ask the kids to sit in a circle. Tell them they’re going to all help create a story. Choose one child to come up with the first sentence. Encourage them to make it silly! (For example, “Once upon a time there was a shark whose teeth were made of marshmallows.”)
- One by one, ask each child to add a sentence to the story.
- Once everyone has had a turn, ask the kids if they want to go around the circle again. Repeat as many times as the kids would like.
- You can do the same activity by writing the sentences on a piece of paper that gets passed around, and then reading the story aloud at the end.
Sports
Sports are one of the best ways to teach kids teamwork. Success on a sports team means learning how to work, strategize, and problem-solve—together.
Kids have to listen closely and talk effectively to each other and then rely on their teammates to play their part and do their best. This experience builds trust and develops social, emotional, and communication skills that will have benefits for a lifetime.
It Takes a Team to Raise Kids
Learning how to work together is a lifelong pursuit, and different people will be better suited to teach your child different aspects of this skill. Like passing a baton in a relay race: everyone has their strength and their moment to make a difference in a child’s life, but it’s the whole team that wins the race.
Make Begin a part of your team! Our award-winning learning programs can help your child develop the skills they need to build their strengths, find their joys, and learn where they fit on all of their teams—now and in the future.
Frequently Asked Questions
At what age do kids learn teamwork?
Kids usually start to grasp the concept of teamwork around four years old. At this age, they begin to understand that what they do can affect others.
This is when they are better able to participate in cooperative play, like building a tower out of blocks with their friends or playing a simple game together. Before age four, their brains aren’t yet developed enough to understand the idea of working with others.
What can I do when my child struggles with teamwork?
The best thing you can do if your child is struggling to work or play with others is to keep practicing at home. Offer plenty of opportunities to build teamwork skills, like playing easy board games together, baking together, and so on.
As you do those things, stay positive and upbeat. Take breaks when needed if your child starts to get frustrated, but continue to practice teamwork skills once they’re ready to try again.
How do you foster a team mentality in a family?
You can help your family focus on teamwork by modeling social and emotional behaviors like respect, care, and open communication and by creating an effective system of sharing home responsibilities, as well as practicing family rituals and traditions.
