Students of all ages and abilities love to work on art projects. Having students collaborate on an art project is one excellent way to help those students build teamwork. One way to have students collaborate is to have each student select one picture to be cut out and placed into a class collage. This activity is perfect for elementary special education, since it doesn't require that the students have advanced social or artistic skills. If you don't want your students playing with scissors, you can cut the images out of the magazine once the students have selected them.
Games are naturally conducive to teamwork because they they're interactive and participatory in nature. However, some games are more conducive to teamwork than others. For example, multiplayer racing and sports console games are perfect for team building because they allow up to four students to play at one time and they 're straightforward enough to be played by people of varying aptitude levels.
Venn diagrams can help students identify traits they do and do not share. In a Venn diagram project, make two to four overlapping circles, then assign one circle to four students. In the parts of the circles that overlap, students agree on personality traits that they all share. In the parts of their respective circles that don't overlap with other circles, each student writes their own unique traits. Since you're doing this project with special education students, you may want to pencil in the personality traits yourself.
If you have a printer and card stock paper, do a class project involving trading cards. One project gets students to decide the content of their own trading cards. In this project, take a picture of each student, then ask each student what their favorite food, school subject and hobby is. Upload each picture to an image editing program, add each student's information beneath their photo, then print the photos on card stock. Once you have the cards printed, the students can trade the cards and learn information about each other. By learning about each other's strengths, students learn how to work together more effectively. This is especially true of special education students, who may have a harder time highlighting their gifts to others.