The Marshmallow Challenge, a Great Team Building Exercise

I am on Spring Break this week and have been going through my Blog Post Drafts.  I came across this empty post that was titled Day4- The Marshmallow Challenge.  On the fourth day with my students this school year I did a team building exercise called "The Marshmallow Challenge" that I had read about on Twitter.  I decided that this would be the perfect activity for team building as we transitioned to math workshop this year in our 7th grade math classes.

Somewhere I took photos of the students working, but I am on my second new iPhone since then and I must not have been using the cloud when I took them.  I will have to ask my husband when he gets home from work today if he can locate those photos.  August/September seems to be missing at the moment.  If I locate the photos I will be sure to add them to this post.

I created this Google Presentation and we used the Workshop format of Opening, MiniLesson, Work Time, and Sharing/Reflection to have the students get used to the structure of what workshop looks like.  The students absolutely loved it!  I cannot even begin to explain how creative they were and how amazed I was how well they worked as teams on Day 4 of school.  Students will still ask me when we can do something fun like The Marshmallow Challenge again.

I figured out how to embed my Google Presentation thanks to a nice tutorial video I found online. Here it is:

I hope this post is helpful to you.  I cannot emphasize enough how well this activity worked with my students.  They really worked on team building while completing one of their favorite activities of the year.  Not a bad way to start the year.  You could use this activity at any time.  If you do please come back and comment on who it went.  I would love to hear about your Marshmallow Challenge.  If you would like me to share with you the google presentation I made leave a comment below telling me how you plan on using this and make sure to leave your email address.  UPDATE 6/19/15:  I will not be emailing anyone the link anymore.  Here is the direct link to the Marshmallow Challenge Google Presentation for anyone who wants to use it.  Enjoy!   UPDATE 9/4/14:  I am sharing this with everyone, but getting MANY MANY delivery failure notifications with the emails people are posting.  I have no idea why this is happening nor how to fix it.  If you don't receive an email with the google presentation link it is because of this and I'm sorry about that.