Hello and welcome back to in the kitchen with Matt, I am
your host, Matt Taylor.
Today I have another vlog episode for you and I'm going
to be talking about what I consider the top three team
building activities with food.
I really like team building activities.
It's really fun to get together with a group of people that you
work with or that you associate regularly or with friends or
with family members and do activities together,
which requires you to work together to accomplish some
sort of goal.
A lot of times it has to do with a competition and the
winning team usually will win some sort of a prize.
So there's definitely some kind of motivation to work together
nicely and create something cool.
Other times it's just to create a more harmonious group
or a team.
And so lately I've been doing these team building activities
or leading these team building activities with my
church group, a big group of singles.
And it's been really, really fun.
The first time I did one of these specific ones I'm talking
about today, it was with my family and my brother actually
told us about it or let us through it.
And it was at my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary
and it was really, really fun activity.
And I thought I would incorporate that with things
that I do at this singles group.
And so let's go ahead and talk about these.
The first one I want to talk about is just an
incredible fun activity.
And what you're going to do and what I have called this
activity or this series of activities, my phrase that I
use is let's build it.
That is the title of these three activities and I'm going
to add more and more activities as I go along.
But so the title is Let's Build It.
And the first activity that I did is and this is the one that
my brother told me about and some of you might be aware of,
this is a pretty common one.
Is building towers out of.
Marshmallows.
Little marshmallows, or you could use the big marshmallows
and spaghetti noodles.
So let's bring the camera in a little closer and I'll show you
what I mean by that.
All right.
So the idea is you would buy each team a package
of marshmallows, and these are super cheap.
All of these activities are going to be showing
are really, really cheap and expensive.
And you don't need to have any kind of cooking products.
Their you don't need to have an oven or microwave or
anything like that.
It's all that everything that can be done, it can be done
in a classroom.
It could be done at home on a kitchen table.
It can be done in an office or like a conference room or
something like that.
All right.
So, you know, a bag of marshmallows,
mini marshmallows is like a dollar or like a dollar fifty,
depending on where you shop.
And then you get a you give each team a bag of spaghetti
noodles as well.
Again, the spaghetti noodles would probably be,
I don't know, a dollar fifty two dollars for a bag
of spaghetti noodles.
So each team, the total cost of these of these items would be
like two to three bucks per team.
And that's really cheap.
And then so what you do is you give them a time limit, 20 to
30 minutes, and then you have them go and you give them the
you can be up to you what you want them to try to build.
I always like to do towers and the tallest tower wins or you
have them try to build something else.
So the team that built something that most resembles
some building or something out of history or something
like that, whatever you want to do.
All right.
And then so what you do is you would grab some of these you
and then you start to try to build stuff with this.
And then, you know, you just go to town starting to try
to build something.
And usually what will happen is someone in the group might have
experience building and they for some reason, they might
just take the lead on you or you might have that stronger
personality that kind of takes the lead.
But usually there's a lot of group input that's taken,
put it, you know, put together in there.
And it's really a good way to get a lot of people involved.
And you can, you know, depending on the dynamic of the
team or the group or the family, you know, they will
all participate in their own way.
Now, I'm not going to build much more than this.
I just want to show you kind of the idea, look, I already made
something that's about, you know, 12 inches tall.
But you could also build in some kind of analogy of like
starting with a found strong foundation first and then
building up from there, which is kind of like in life
with families or with businesses or in
church groups.
You want to start with a good foundation first.
And then go from there, and that'll help you to reach
higher heights, you know?
That's really cool.
Here's some pictures of the activity that we did, some of
the awesome things that people built.
And we got some pretty, pretty high structures
that were built.
And everyone had a really great time.
All right, so the first team building activity is building
towers with marshmallows and spaghetti noodles, the second
activity along the same lines is building towers or tall
structures with frosting and graham crackers.
Now, when I did this in the past, it was
around Christmas time.
And so we had like the Christmas theme.
And instead of building just a classic little
gingerbread house, we did gingerbread towers and try to
build them as tall as we could.
And so what you do is you just it's up to you.
What I did, which was really actually pretty fun, is we had
about eight teams or 10 teams.
I think it was 10 teams and there's about six to seven
people on a team.
And what I did is everyone started off with a a thing
of frosting, which was like two dollars or something
like that.
And then also they had a box of graham crackers.
And then what I what I did is I had a table set up where I had
a lot of extra stuff that you could use.
I had extra graham crackers, I had extra frosting, I had
piping bags with tips on it that you can that
they could use.
I had different kind of decorations that could
be used.
And what I did is I had a member from each team come up
and we did like a snake draft.
I had them pick a number between one and 10 or
something like that.
And then I would do a snake drafts of the first and
that went first.
They would get first pick of something extra from the table
and so on.
It would go down and then you just go back around.
And so everyone got two extra things to help them
build their.
Build Adair graham cracker to hours or gingerbread towers,
and that was quite a bit of fun, we had a really good
turnout and everyone had such a good time and it was a good way
as I would walk around and look at how people were interacting
with each other.
You can always tell there was that one person who kind of
took the lead and and then there's others that were
putting in there their two cents, if you will, and had
a really good job.
Also, the caveat with that particular time is I gave them
a board, a cardboard chalkboard,
and they had to be able to build it on that board and then
pick it up and take it over to the display table.
And that was so that was one of the things that they had to
keep in mind.
Again, there were some pretty, pretty tall structures that
were built with that.
It was really an interesting experience and a fun
team building activity.
All right.
So there you go.
That is the team building activity number two,
building towers or structures with graham
crackers and frosting.
It's up to you what you want to do.
It doesn't necessarily have to be towers.
It could be again, it could be try to make some one of the top
wonders of the world try to build.
Or it could be the coolest graham cracker house or
gingerbread house or something like that.
And then you have judges and you get prizes for
the winners, stuff like that.
It doesn't have to be towers.
I love towers and tall structures.
So most of the things that I do have to be are
centered around that.
But totally up to you what you want the theme of it to be.
That brings us to the third and final team building activity
that I have for you.
And again, it's along the same line.
It's let's build it.
But what we are doing is we are building towers or structures
using only spice drops or gumdrops and toothpicks.
So different building materials lends itself to
different structures, of course, again,
for this activity, ie, the stipulation was try to
build them tall, but also you can try to build them
like really, really cool.
So we had two different categories, one for
the most creative and coolest and the other for the tallest.
Let me bring a camera in for a closer look and just show you
kind of what I mean by this.
Again, this activity is super, super inexpensive.
This bag of spice drops cost one dollar at Wal-Mart,
gets 98 cents, and these toothpicks cost 69 cents at
my grocery store.
So really, really cheap.
So it's under two dollars per team.
So it's really cool.
Again, I had extras in case people ran out and what they
would do there, grab some spice drops and.
You know, you start going to town.
I thought it'd be really cool to build something like
the Louvre, the Louvre.
How do you pronounce that?
I'm just going to a really quick little structure here.
Also, one thing I want to mention, it's it's up to you
if you let them know ahead of time what they're building
materials will be.
But if it's a you know, if you're going to have it as a
competition setting with there's prizes and stuff,
you know, there are some people that are going to research
online to see if anybody has done it and see what's
the best technique.
I always find it's fun to keep the building materials
a secret.
And then it adds an air of mystery, especially if
you're doing a as like an ongoing activity, you know,
once a quarter or something like that, you do an episode or
you do an addition of let's build it.
And if you want to have me come and run a one of these,
let's build it team building activities
for your organization.
I'm open to doing that.
And you can hire me to come over to your organization
and do it.
Seems like it's something simple that you could run
yourself without needing my building expertise.
Anyway, there's my little tower.
All right.
So there you have it, my three top team building
activities with food.
There's plenty of other team building activities out there.
I think the ultimate team building activity would be
cooking some kind of recipe together.
But you can't always do that in your organization where
you're at, but you certainly can do that as a family.
Anyway, I'm Matt Taylor.
This has been an episode of In the Kitchen with Matt.
Thank you for joining us.
Until next time.
Take care.