Classroom Games (Word Games)

Hello,

        Your favorite blogger Wintermute here giving you your daily dose of Dumbr. Today we will be discussing Word Games you can play with your students in the classroom. The purpose of these games was to get the kids talking a lot and working together. The more they talk and help each other out the better.

1.       Blindfold - I would blindfold one kid and move the desks around to make a maze or an obstacle course. I would hide a point card somewhere in the room. The object of this game was for the remaining students to vocally navigate the blindfolded student around to the card without touching any of the desks. Words you will need to teach to your students prior to playing would be turn left/right, forward, back, etc etc.

2.       Forts – Take some blocks, the bigger the blocks the better. At my school we had these very large inflatable blocks. I would have a king/captain command the other students to build a fort. He would have to tell the students to build the pieces, in, over, under, beside or behind the other pieces. They would all have to work together to figure out how to set it up, good to do with teams to see who is faster. This is a great game to teach prepositions.

3.       Telephone – Surely we have all played this game. In case you haven’t here are the Dumbr rules: pick your first student, whisper something into their ear, and have them whisper it to the next student, so on and so forth, by the end of the line have the last student tell you what the message was and see if it held up. Generally speaking students won’t try very hard with this game sadly. So you will have to find some way to keep them motivated, again points work wonders. If you are like me and do not have a whisper voice you can always write it down on a piece of paper.

Music Games

1.       Hokey Pokey – We all know hokey pokey and it’s a pretty long song that can get rather tedious fast. So instead of doing the usual motions replace them with something a bit more fun. I tend to do things like; tongue, eyes, hair, and a class favorite, butt.

2.       One little two little three little fingers – I won’t go over the whole song but it’s pretty straight forward. Count your little fingers up to ten, when you reach ten, tickle a student. This however can be a lot of work for the lazy teacher, so after a while have your students do it instead.

3.       Ratchet and Clank – If you haven’t noticed I steal a lot of ideas from video games. Here is another one of those ideas. In Ratchet and Clank Tools of Destruction, Ratchet must disguise himself as pirate and dance a jig with fellow pirates to prove his worth. He is issued a series of commands such as, to the left, to the right, to the sky, and of course, shake your booty. Well guess what, now you too can play this otherwise artificial time filler with your students in class.

A lot of these games stemmed from my lack of knowledge on how to play with kids, and my greater knowledge of how to play video games. You can use these tools to your advantage as well.  Be sure to come back tomorrow for more Dumbr.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute