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City school team building
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Terry’Onna Reashton, a sixth-grader, and Tanistia Bates, a fifthgrader, work together Wednesday during a gathering of Youngstown city’s elementary school student Quaglia teams. The Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations is a Maine-based organization that works to improve school climates. This is its third year in the city schools. The exercises Wednesday focused on team building.
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
City elementary-school students Isabelle Hyson, Jose Figueroa, Diasia Mercado, David Conrad, Wanda McKeithen and Hannah Streb folded, crumpled, rolled and taped pieces of paper together, trying to assemble a tower.
“We’re trying to build the tallest tower we can in five to seven minutes,” Jose, 10, a fifth-grader at Paul C. Bunn Elementary School, explained.
Isabelle, 9, a fourth-grader at Williamson Elementary, and Diasia, 10, a fourth-grader at Discovery at Volney, worked on the bottom of the tower, attempting to stabilize it.
“You should make supports for it, like things hanging from the sides,” David, 11, a fifth-grader from Bunn, offered.
The students from the city’s elementary schools gathered Wednesday at William Holmes McGuffey Elementary School for team-building exercises with the Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations. This is the third year the Maine-based organization has been working in the district to try to improve school climates.
Each school has a Q Team of students, and those team members attended Wednesday’s event.
Julie Hellerstein, director of student services for Quaglia, said the students will take the skills and information they learned back to their home schools.
Joshua Rheins, 9, a fourth-grader at Williamson, said the paper-tower exercise taught participants to all work together.
“We all had a part,” he said.
Five people were on his team, and each had a task based on his or her skills and wishes, Joshua said.
In another exercise, students were asked to imagine that the gymnasium floor was covered in lava except for two safe zones. Pieces of construction paper were heat-resistant shoes that allowed them to walk across, but there weren’t enough for everyone.
The teams had to devise strategies to get all of their members from one safe zone to the other safely.
One team sent two members across the gym at a time, sending one back, carrying the heat-resistant shoes.
The other placed the pieces of construction paper across the gym, providing a path for team members to follow. All of the members of the first team made it across first.
Each school is focusing on a different goal or project this school year.
At McGuffey, students are working on a cookbook, collecting recipes from their classmates so it’s a collaborative effort. They also plan a play about bullying, which Q Team members will pen themselves, to produce for the student body.
At Bunn, students are emphasizing a sense of accomplishment with team members showing they’re proud of the school. At Volney, the team hopes to make their classmates feel like they belong. Ways they plan to accomplish that include encouraging fellow students to invite others to sit with them at lunch and to introduce themselves.
Williamson’s Q-Team also plans to tackle bullying. One way to do that is through peer mediation. Joshua said that means talking to one another about what started the problem and trying to reach a solution.
“If someone is bullying someone, they must be doing it for a reason,” he said.