Social Studies Middle School Guide

Canyons School District

Instructional Supports Department

Relationships and Connection Activities Helps to build an emotional connection between people Relationships are characterized by “openness, trust, respect, and appreciation.” The purpose of relationships is to build connection between two or more people. Connection activities are things we can do to help build a safe climate in our classroom, and build teacher-student and student-student relationships. Below are some examples of connection activities, including directions on how to do these activities. For other ideas, refer to the Positive Teacher Student Relationship page in the curriculum map. Milling to Music Instructions: When music plays you will mill about the room being intentional to acknowledge and greet one another as you pass by each other. When the music stops, participants form a small group of 3-5 people. Request they keep their voices down initially so you can read the question. They each take a turn to answer a question such as “What is your favorite summer activity?” After a few minutes you will play music again and they begin milling about again. You repeat this process for anywhere from 2-4 questions. Before they respond to the final question, be sure to tell them this is the final round, so when the music plays again it means it’s time to return back to their seats. Shout Outs Instructions: Divide your whole group into 4 smaller groups. Invite participants to give as many short “shout outs” as possible to one another for 2 minutes to others in their group. Join two of the groups together, so now there are only two groups. Again invite participants to give as many short “shout outs” to one another as possible for another 2 minutes. Finally bring together the whole group, and once again invite short “shout outs” for another 3 minutes. Snowball Toss Instructions: Provide pieces of paper to write down the answer to a prompt you provide. An example might be, “What can you or are you doing to build up other people in your life?” 30 second snowball toss: Everyone crumbles up their response and has a snowball toss with each other for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds, each person picks up a snowball. You then do a whip around the room with everyone reading the response from the snowball they selected, while staying in the spot where they picked up their snowball. RO SHAM BO ROCKSTAR Instructions: Activity starts out as regular Ro-Sham-Bo game, with the added twist is that the person that doesn’t win best of three then joins the other person’s “team” to cheer this person on. Each round the size of the group should double, until there are only two groups left for the ultimate battle with their respective teams cheering them on.

Sources: George Goetschius & Joan Tash (1967) and Kerri Berkowitz (2020)