When your children are constantly bickering and arguing any time you ask them to attempt a task together, it can be taxing on your nerves. Personality differences, maturity levels and boredom can all make your children fight and spend more time aggravating each other than they do working together on a common goal. By getting them to work together and motivating them to accomplish a task, you not only teach the importance of cooperation, but the vast benefits of working together.
Step 1
Initiate cooperative learning exercises with your children to teach them how to work together successfully, suggests education resource Edutopia.org. Offer challenges and activities that require their cooperation to accomplish. For instance, create a story board where one student is in charge of characters, another in charge of plot line and another in setting. Where the assignment may seem like creative writing, it gives students a chance to work together in a new capacity.
Step 2
Engage children in games that build a feeling of community, suggests YouthLearn.org. A classic game is to have children all join hands in a random pattern, grabbing the hands of someone across from them or beside them to create a knot. Together, they must "untie" the knot to end up in a circle once again without ever letting go of each other's hands. The game is interesting and entertaining enough that the children may not even realize they're working together until you point it out to them.
Step 3
Explain the benefits of working together by leading a discussion directly following cooperative exercises and activities. Point out the ways working together made a task easier, and ask the children what would happen if someone refused to work with the group. For the writing exercise, without all members functioning together the story wouldn't be finished. In the knot-tying game, it would only take one uncooperative person to ruin it for everyone. Have the children brainstorm the benefits of working together, like faster solutions, better ideas and a sense of community.
Step 4
Offer praise to children when you notice them working together. Sometimes they may work together without even realizing that they are cooperating. The Pennsylvania State University Cooperative Extension and College of Agricultural Sciences recommends that you be specific with your praise, such as, "Tommy, thank you for helping Angela find the answer to that homework problem," or "Megan, I appreciated when you helped Sally clean her room." Let the children know cooperation is desirable behavior so they're motivated to try again.
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