Post by Prakriti and Prabriti Nepal
Rukmini Foundation Didis

Team Building

Rukmini foundation already has welcomed two groups of scholars, and is always looking for ways to cultivate new ideas to help build new skills for our scholars. The Didi Program, which is a motivational program has been trying to help the girls develop not only academically, but develop other skills that are important.  This year we wanted to find more ways to help our Bahinis (younger sisters / scholars) learn how to work together better. With that aim, the Didis (elder sisters / mentors) held a mentoring session about team building on 9^th August 2013 with 20 scholars as participants. The scholars participated with great zeal and enthusiasm despite the stress of examinations which were on the following day.

As usual the Didi program began with our normal greetings. Mr. Nabin Aryal, Mr. Niroj Shrestha and Mr. Sashi Sharma, the foundation leadership, also attended the meeting. At first  Mr Sashi Sharma (Regional Director) explained to our scholars about the importance of developing good habits for life, whether with school work or other things. Mr. Nabin Aryal and Mr. Niroj Shrestha wished the scholars well for the exams and encouraged them to be as involved as possible in these types of extracurricular activities.

After the greetings, we started the session, which was focused on team building. We first discussed about the concept of teams and how important it was for the Bahinis to work well together.  To turn the concept into something real, we devised a a small team building  game named “callers and builders”.  We divided the scholars into 5 groups of 4 members each where each team had an observer, a runner, and two drawers. The task was to have an observer look at a given drawing and explain it to a runner, and the runner then had to convey it to drawers who would draw the picture on the basis of information given by the runner. Each team was given twenty five minutes to complete this task. Everybody seemed to enjoy this activity, and they were putting their best efforts to coordinate properly with all team members. What was great for us Didis to see was that some of our scholars were working together for the first time and they did really well in coordinating with each other.

During the task, the scholars understood how important it is to understand one another through effective communication in order to complete the task successfully. They also realized that they had some skills that they needed to work on like proper communication skills, careful observation, and proper coordination among team members. They also understood that a team’s work can either be easy or hard depending on how dedicated all of the team members are.

Original Drawing

Team 1 Drawing:

Team 2 Drawing:

Team 3 Drawing:

Team 4 Drawing:

Team 5 Drawing: