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By Jeffery Brauer
If you’re looking for ways to entertain a group of teenagers while keeping them fit and healthy, team building activities for teens and youth groups are great ways to promote active lifestyles. These activities let you trigger their critical thinking skills while encouraging collaboration, which helps them grow as individuals and as a team in a fun, engaging way. Whether you’re looking to help your group of teens before, during or after school or church, you can use these activities to build a stronger team and establish a bond between the members of your youth group.
Pool or Beach Day
You can treat your group to a day at the pool or beach depending on your youth group’s location to help them get to know one another. Because you should encourage each member to bond with his or her peers, swimming is a great way to break the ice. The water is also a safe place to work on skills for sports teams, so you can encourage the kids to play with a frisbee, football, and more to enhance their hand-eye coordination.
Wheelbarrow Race
When you’re in need of a quick team building activity that doesn’t require any props, you can challenge your teenagers to an energy-filled wheelbarrow race. You can get the kids to find a partner and then set a start line and a finish line. After they line up, you can tell them to see who can wheel the other person across the grass the quickest.
Human Knot
You won’t always have time to devote the entire day to building your team, so you can incorporate shorter bonding experiences into your time with the teens. When you get them to participate in an activity like the human knot, they can work on their communication skills while solving the puzzle together. All you need to do is have your kids stand in a circle, join hands with people across from them, and then untangle the knot as a team.
Youth Group Outing
For the times when you have a lot more hours on your hands with the teenagers, you can take them on a special day out to spend time as a group. This team bonding activity works well for youth sports teams in particular, as you can take them to watch more experienced players. Whether you’re in charge of a soccer, baseball or other type of team, you can schedule a time for the kids and some parents to head to a local event.
Pass the Hula Hoop
You can train teens to listen, follow instructions, and work as a team using a prop as simple as a hula hoop. Because this exercise requires each member of the team to solve the puzzle, you can encourage them to move the hoop all the way around the circle. This exercise entails all of the kids holding hands in a circle and then working together to get the hula hoop from one side of the circle to the other without letting go.
Throw the Water Balloon
If you’re looking for a way to stay cool on a hot day with the youth group you manage, you can organize a game of pass the water balloon. You’ll need to have your teenagers help you fill up the balloons with water and then they can break off into pairs. Once each member of the team has a partner, the kids can toss the balloons back and forth, taking a step back after each toss, to see who can go the farthest without breaking the balloon.
Relay Races
You can encourage healthy living while keeping the kids in your youth group engaged with team building activities by organizing a day of relay races. Whether or not you’re in charge of a sports team, you can get the teens to practice almost any skill by turning the exercise into a relay. This activity can work with basketballs, baseballs, soccer balls and more to turn practice into an exciting, constructive team building activity.
After you’ve read through this list of team building activities for teens and youth groups, you’ll be ready to help the kids in your group get better at teamwork, cooperating and creative thinking. These constructive activities are designed to build trust between the teens while helping them develop a bond that they’ll benefit from in the future. Because these activities are interactive ways to make sure each teen is having fun, you can help them learn while having a good time.