11 teamwork-inspiring games that you can organize at home, with little to no materials needed!
Looking for team building activities that kids will enjoy?
Searching for fun teamwork games that need few to no materials?
Wondering which team activities your children and their friends will actually enjoy taking part in?
This is the blog post you’re looking for!
Team games that your kids will enjoy taking part in
As a parent, I think you know this - today's children are overwhelmed with technology.
Weaning them off of screens remains a challenge.
Our own lives are also getting busier, limiting the time we can put into organizing games and get-togethers for our children.
This is where these activities will prove useful.
They give kids a chance to know one another, appreciate the joys of meeting and interacting with their friends in person, build trust as a group, and have fun.
Below we've listed out 11 team games and activities that you can host right at home for your kids and their friends, with very little preparation.
Tick Tock
Sounds a lot like the social media app that’s gotten so many of us hooked…but this is a game that’s useful for teaching kids how to negotiate and work out how to accomplish a shared objective as a team.
Create a list of activities on chart paper, assigning each job a point value.
For example: doing 25 jumping jacks earns 5 points, giving everyone in the group a nickname earns 10 points, and so on.
Make sure you have enough tasks to last more than 10 minutes.
Divide the kids into teams of five or six and give them 10 minutes to accumulate as many points as possible by deciding which tasks from the list to do. Good luck!
Don’t wake the dragon!
This is a good option for very young children.
The premise is that children are the inhabitants of a village that’s being terrorized by a dragon.
Luckily, the dragon has dozed off for some time.
To protect their homes, the villagers must arrange themselves from shortest to tallest without speaking (otherwise, the dragon may wake up).
Once the order is complete, they must all shout "Boo!" simultaneously to scare away the dragon and save their town.
Blind folks’ trail
You’ll need 2 rooms and a number of objects to create an obstacle course for this game.
Divide the children into teams of 5-6 players each, and ask them to remain in one room.
In the other room, create an obstacle course. Get a rope to serve as a guide.
Blindfold the first team, lead them into the room with the obstacle course, and ask them to find their way through it, following the rope.
The team that knocks over the least obstacles wins. If there’s a tie, the team that finished faster wins.
The minefield
Another obstacle course game.
The challenge is to tackle an obstacle course in pairs.
One child is blindfolded; their partner has to verbally guide them through a series of obstacles.
Make sure to mix up the layout between each team so that no two teams experience the exact same course.
Circle of silence/The silence game
Blindfold one of the children, and ask the others to stand in a circle around him/her.
Then take something that can make noise (like a bell or a tin with marbles), and ask the children in the circle to pass it along
Fingertip hula hoop
Ask the children to stand in a circle, raise their arms, and extend their index fingers.
Next, place a hula hoop so that it rests on the tips of the children’s fingers.
The challenge is for the children to lower the hoop to the ground without dropping it - and also without touching the hook in any way other than by the tips of their fingers (how they started).
Want to make it more challenging? Limit how much the players are allowed to communicate with each other.
Seeing spots
Put colored stickers on each kid's forehead, without letting them know what color they've received.
The idea is that kids with the same colored stickers belong to the same group.
The challenge is for the children to figure out what their team is, and group together...without speaking.
Group jump rope
Divide the children into teams of 3-4 players each.
You and another parent hold a rope at either end and ask one of the teams to stand in the middle.
Then, start swinging the rope.
The challenge is for the kids to all jump at the right moment to let the rope through.
The team that can jump the most number of times wins.
Common interests
The objective of this activity is for children to discover various aspects of one another, and to let their creativity flourish.
Here’s how it goes:
Start by dividing the kids into groups of 4-5.
Next, ask them to talk amongst themselves for 10-15 minutes, with the objective of finding out shared interests or aspects of their lives - it could be anything from they all love chicken sandwiches from Chick-fil-A to they all have cats as pets.
Finally, ask each team to design a flag depicting their shared interests.
Cross the river!
A great game to stimulate kids’ creative thinking skills.
Players must work together to cross a "river".
Wondering where to get the “river”? Easy - make two parallel lines on the ground with sidewalk chalk or masking tape.
Each team of children is given six square cardboard rafts to assist in crossing the river.
The catch is, you’ll set up rules to make the task challenging. For example, a raft that’s unattended will float away.
A raft with more than one person on it sinks.
One of the parents will need to monitor the game and remove any rafts that are out of play.
Divide the children into teams and see which team can cross the river the quickest.
The lifeboat game
A great game to instill values like camaraderie and out-of-the-box thinking.
Divide the kids into teams of 5-7 players each.
Give each team a "lifeboat" - a rope forming a circle on the ground.
Make sure each team has the same length of rope.
In the first turn, everyone on the team can fit into the boat.
Now, ask them to get out, and shrink the rope by a foot.
Ask them to fit inside their "lifeboat".
And repeat, and repeat...till they're unable to fit everyone anymore.
The team that could fit into the smallest boat wins.
But more than winning, they got a taste for working towards taking everyone in their group along.
Team building for children in Chicago
Looking for a great team building experience for your kids in Chicago?
Head for Chicago’s #1 escape room!
We have “child-friendly” versions of 2 of our most popular adventure games - The Bunker and The Prison - in which adults are not required to be inside the room with the kids.
You can refer to our blog post on child and teen-friendly escape rooms for further information.
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