All about Cooperation

It's been a while since we posted anything on our blog. This season is just flying by! We're sure you have seen all the emails about the upcoming 5k Fun Run on Sunday, May23. We are excited to have as many family and friends join us in that celebration run! Let us know if you didn't see the email and we'll ensure you get the information.

Yesterday, our GOTR group focused on COOPERATION. It is simply amazing to watch these girls devourer such a heavy topic as cooperation. Of course, they were able to tell us what cooperation was (and wasn't). There were many antipodal stories about challenges with classroom project teams and how cooperation didn't always work at home with their brothers/sisters. But what we found the most interesting was the cooperation demonstrations that these girls put on for us.

We started with a game called "skin the snake" (not really sure why it's called that...but whatever.) The girls had to put themselves in a line formation and one by one sit on the ground while holding the hand of the person in front of them. Sound simple? Well, imagine that the hand holding is happening while you are bent over and one of your hands is looped through your legs... Now, there's a yoga challenge for even the best of us. But that pose wasn't at all challenging for our girls. Not only did they follow directions quickly, but they just as rapidly figured out how to accomplish the sitting without letting go, without falling and without a bunch of yelling. Pretty impressive, we have to say!

Our cooperation then moved to jump roping. Using the LONGEST rope you have ever seen, the girls took turns getting through as Coach Connie and Coach Tanya turned the rope. The rules were to get through the turning rope without it touching you. They could stop, jump, and run out, or just run through. Together the girls decided the best way to get from one side to other. And although they had a few instances where the rope touched them, they quickly regroup and began again. The listening, the respect, the cooperation just oozed out of them like they were professional meeting organizers! And within minutes they had move the team from one side to otherside of the turning rope.

We then put out the biggest cooperation challenge yet. Coach Jenn put 80 colorful bracelets into a big pile and told the girls that the bracelets represented the number of laps that had to be run. She didn't tell them how many laps they had to run though. She left that up to them. Here's where we saw some math skills (and negotiation skills) come into play. It was easy to say that each person would run 10 laps...hence the math skills. But not every person could (or in some cases wanted) to run 10 laps. So the GOTR team negotiations took over. In the end, each person had a number of bracelets representing the number of laps she committed to do for the team. And everyone ran their laps per their commitment....

But guess what? At the end, we had only 79 bracelets! Call it a miscalculation or "by design", but the missing bracelet allowed the girls to run the last lap as a one big GOTR cooperating team! We wished we had the camera to snap pictures of the girls coming into the finish area together.

This Friday, we have another heavy topic -GOSSIPPING and how that impacts not only the person who is being talked about, but also the person who doing the taking.