Online Team Building Activities For Students
We’re heading into the festive season, which means your students are getting restive!
They need some focus and fun in their lives ahead of the big break. So we’ve curated a list of easy-to-organise online activities you could do with them.
Best of all, these ideas can all be executed with the usual virtual platforms like Zoom, Skype, or Google Meet – no fancy software needed! Here’s a tip, though – if you want to be able to hold larger group activities, choose a platform that allows you to create breakout rooms. That way, you can hold more complex activities, or even multiple activities at the same time. And your students can rotate in and out of them , meaning there’s less chance of them being bored.
The theme we’re centring this on is team-building. This means that these activities will help your students come together and learn how to navigate group challenges, communicate with each other, focus on common goals and accomplish them with minimum conflict and maximum coordination.
Here are 9 activities for some virtual Christmas team-building sessions for students:
1. Virtual Escape Rooms
An escape room is a fantastic team building activity. It’s tailor-made for big groups of people; it’s complex and immersive; and it brings out a healthy sense of competition among players. We’d highly recommend this to help your students work on their collaboration and communication – while having a blast.
In case you don’t know what they are – escape rooms are safe, supervised locked-room environments. Players are provided with clues to solve puzzles and overcome challenges that will help them ‘escape’ from the room.
Entermission Sydney is a virtual reality escape room game! We curate safe, supervised locked room environments via VR headsets.
You have to solve puzzles and take on challenges to be able to ‘escape’. From fighting aliens in space to fighting supernatural creatures in creepy old temples to fighting a super villain inside his own brain – you can do it all!
In fact, we have a special virtual escape room specifically called Christmas. In it, Santa has got caught in a blizzard, lost all the presents and can’t find his way home. Your students must get to the North Pole to find out to light the biggest Christmas tree in the forest to help Santa find his way home, and do some side quests – all in just an hour!
It’s a perfect treat for kids ahead of the big festival. So book your slots for our escape room games today. Take a look at all our exciting missions here. Visit the pages for our team-building packages for Sydney here and Melbourne here. And visit here to book your slot.
2. A gift exchange
Gift exchanges are a classic Christmas activity, and by setting some simple rules in place, they can really help bring a class together. You can do the always popular Secret Santa. Instead of asking students to buy something for their classmates, why not ask them to make something creative that can be sent online – such as a poem, a card, an illustration, a story, or even a tiny song?
Put the names into a Santa hat to assign a student their gift recipient. At the same time ask the class to fill out a form saying exactly what easy-to-deliver gift they would like. You can have the students show off what they received in class one day! What better way to bring some Christmas joy into a team-building session?
3. Trivia time!
Who doesn’t like a Christmas trivia game?! You could always go for the classic Q and A format, or have multimedia presentations with text, pictures, and movie and audio clips. Divide your class into groups of 3 or 4, prepare some holiday-themed questions such as holiday movies, songs, traditions, and more, and let the games begin!
This game encourages healthy competition, teamwork and communication – everything a teambuilding activity should have. And it’s a lot of fun!
4. Celebrate Around the World
This is perfect for a diverse class with diverse traditions. If you have students with heritages from around the world or from different faiths, why not encourage them to share it with the world? After all, October, November and December are festive seasons across many different regions and religions.
Ask your students to pick their favourite tradition from their favourite festival – this could be Diwali, Halloween, Hanukkah, Ramadan or, of course, Christmas. Then have them discuss it with the class. This can include a Krampus parade in Austria, the Yule goat in Sweden, a lantern festival in the Philippines, Candlemas in Mexico – and so on. It’s a great way to teach children listening skills, and to treat their fellow classmates with respect.
5. Start a Christmas Classics Club
We LOVE this idea, as it combines learning with socialisation – our favorite kind of Christmas team building activity! Start a Christmas Classics Club with your students. This could mean setting aside an hour every week in the run-up to the festival to discuss classic holiday movies, books, home traditions, or even recipes. What better way to bond than over a class viewing party of “Home Alone,” or reading “A Christmas Carol”, or talking about favourite family traditions and dishes?
6. Dish Out Some Recipes (with parental supervision)
There are so many classic holiday dishes that you could do with your class – and the best part is that most of them involve no heat, especially if you send an email out to their parents first, asking them to get together the ingredients.
You could ask the parents to get a low-cost gingerbread house kit, which have pre-baked gingerbread pieces, frosting, and even instructions, and build gingerbread houses with the class. The whole class can put together their houses and decorate them together on a live platform.
You could also do the same with Christmas cookies – perhaps your students would like to bring their own cookies that they baked with their parents to class, or use DIY cookie decoration kits. These kits generally have pre-baked sugar cookies, frosting, and sprinkles. You could ask them to do three cookies each of a Christmas-related thing – a Santa, a Christmas tree and a candy cane, perhaps?
You could even divide your class into groups, give them creative themes for decoration, and then have them vote to see which group did the best job in coordinating their decorations. This way, the kids learn to focus on a common goal, innovate and be creative, and of course, have fun.
We would also highly encourage making some hot chocolate with your class because, well, why wouldn’t you?! Perhaps the parents could handle the heat (!) and your students could mix and match flavours. It allows them the chance to experiment a bit, with classics like peppermint or modern ones like Nutella. It’s easy, it’s fun and you have a lovely drink at the end that you have all prepared together – a classic feel-good end to a teambuilding session.
7. Do some Christmas DIY
Christmas is a GREAT time to do some simple crafts with your students, not only because there are so many little things to work on but also because a hand-made gift is perfect for the holiday spirit. It’s also a proven way to encourage creativity, proper execution of tasks, and gentle competition – which are both very desired characteristics of team building activities.
The first option would of course be the beloved Christmas card. It could be an individual activity, or you could split your class into small groups. Once again, you could give them themes – or just let their imaginations run wild. Nothing is off limits – they can use cardboard, glitter, ice-cream sticks for tree trunks, little sprinkles for the decor – whatever their heart desires. At the end of the class, have them hold up their cards. You could have the class vote on their favourites – or just keep it as a fun activity!
Our second suggestion is to have your class decorate Santa hats! Ask your students to come to class with a simple Santa hat, in whatever colour they like, and art supplies like paint, glue, and glitter. At the end of the class, everyone gets to wear the hat they made and admire each other! This could be both an individual or a group activity – with each group competing to make the funnest hat possible. Personally, we’d recommend putting some googly eyes on!
And our final Christmas decorating activity is, of course, for your students to decorate a tree together. If a tree is not available – how about a corner of their home, or perhaps even their room? You could hang ornaments, put up some stockings on the mantle, string up some fairy lights and tinsel in bookshelves, or hang some mistletoe on the door. Those who celebrate different festivals could put up their own preferred decorations. It’ll be a great break for your students, and a good way to socialise them and bring them together in these days of online classes.
8. Have a Christmas-themed Scavenger Hunt
Email your kids’ parents to hide some Christmas-themed stuff around the house, and then send them on a scavenger hunt! Give the students a list of the items they need to find, like decorations, food, old photos and so on. The fastest to find all the items around their house and run back on camera wins!
It’s a great way to encourage students to complete activities under time pressure, and pay attention to details – while getting in the holiday spirit.
19. Indulge in a karaoke caroling session
What can be a better holiday-themed team building activity to have your class sing their hearts out! You could play Youtube videos of the songs. If you’re handy with a guitar or a keyboard or any other instrument, or if any of your students are – why not play a song or two yourselves?
It’s a great way to bring a remote class together, especially at the end of a long day.
20. Spread the Christmas Cheer
Christmas can be a tough time for a lot of people. Why not encourage your students to help out? They could do it through a local non-profit organisation by donating old toys, books and clothes that can help kids just like them who are in need. You could then have a discussion in class about what the kids chose to give away, and how they think it will help others. We’d suggest not turning this into a competition – it’s all about the joy and fulfillment of giving, which in itself is a powerful binder.
And there you have it – 9 lovely, low-key Christmas team building activities that can all be done online. We hope you and your class have a blast doing them – and if you do, why not tell us about them in the comments?
Don’t forget to book your sessions at Entermission for some virtual escape room gameplay! We’ll see you around. Happy holidays!
