Happy Watermelon Day! Celebrating with a Healthy Team Building Activity

Work has been very stressful lately and I could tell that my aide staff was feeling it.  I wanted to come up with an idea that would be fun and de-stressing for my staff, a healthy idea and inexpensive for me (so the obvious and easy ideas of ordering pizza or bringing in donuts was out!).  So I hopped online and saw that August 3rd is National Watermelon Day.  Who knew?

One of the first things that comes to my mind when I think of watermelon is a seed spitting contest. When is the last time that you participated in a watermelon seed spitting contest?  A long time, right? I was a little worried that my staff would think it was silly, but we need some silly at work right now.  So I posted a sign saying Team Meeting at 2PM.

I had one hurdle - my day got crazy so my plan to run to the grocery store in between meetings fell through.  I walked over to the corner store across the street where I knew they had a small selection of fresh fruit.  Can you believe that they only had seedless watermelons???  As a back-up plan I bought grapes.

When my Team gathered at 2PM I could hear the groans about ANOTHER meeting.  What was up now?  They were quite surprised when I wished them a Happy Watermelon Day and suggested that we celebrate with a Grape Spitting Contest.  There was a pause . . . and then everyone burst out laughing!  We headed out to the patio off of our Day Center.  We set a spot where staff had to stand and then everyone got two turns to spit a grape and see how far it would go.

Let me tell you - we had SO much fun!  Everyone participated and we were cracking up.  It was the perfect way to break the tension.  Staff members were laughing, cheering each other on and teasing each other a bit.

Our Grape Spitting Champion and Runner-Up!

In the end we crowned a Champion and Runner-Up.  Our Champion chose a $5 gift card to Get-Go (a gas station and grocery).  The Runner-Up received a certificate for an extra fifteen minutes for her lunch one day.  To celebrate, we all snacked on seedless watermelon!

This activity took about 15 minutes (only half of my Team was in the Center at the time).  It was a great team building activity and stress reliever.  Everyone enjoyed the watermelon which was a healthy snack.  And the entire event cost me less than $15.

Healthy!  Fun!  Cheap!
Doesn't get much better than that!