Elementary School Games and Activities

Elementary School Games and Activities

Songs

1st through 4th Grade
Hello, How are you?
Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
The Number Song

The ABC Song

Row Row Row Your Boat

3rd through 6th Grade

The Hokey Pokey

Wheels on the Bus

Itsy Bitsy Spider

Twinkle, Twinkle

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Mori no Kumasan (The Bear)

Warm Ups

For starting up class and vocabulary review

Action Warm Up

This works best for 1st through 4th graders, but some 5th and 6th grade classes enjoy it too. After doing your opening greetings, tell the kids to sit down. Then tell them to stand up. After repeating “Sit down!, stand up” a few times, add other action words like “Walk”, “Run”, “Jump”, “Stop”, “Clap”, “Spin”. You can trick students by giving the gesture to sit down when you say “Stand up”, or spinning when you say “Jump”. To make it harder, add other action words and adjectives like “Faster”, “Slower”, “Big Jump”, “Small Jump.”

Row Column Game

Use for 5th and 6th graders when reviewing vocabulary that your students are somewhat familiar with. Have the first row of students stand up. Slowly reveal the first flash card to the students. When the students know what the card is and can say it in English, they raise their hands. Pick the first student to raise his or her hand to say the card. If it’s said correctly the student can sit down. Then reveal the next card and do the same thing until there is only one student left standing in the front row. The last person’s row then stands up and the game continues until you decide to end the game. You can have the last person or row left standing do a batsu game.

Row-Column-Self

A variation on the Row and Column game: all students stand, the teacher asks a question, and whoever answers correctly can choose whether their row, their column, or just themselves can sit down.

Yamanote sen Game

Use this warm up game to go over vocabulary with students. Position the flashcards in a circle on the chalkboard. For practice, have all the students clap twice, say the first flash card, clap twice, say the second card, clap twice, say the third card, and continue in this way until you tell them its okay to stop. Decide on a student order from first to last. Then start the chant up again, but this time have them say it student by student, switching between claps. If a student cannot say the word or hesitates too long, then he or she must play a batsu game. For the batsu game, I usually have them sing the weekday song or some type of Eigo Note “Chants” in front of the class.

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes:

A great song to practice body vocab. Vary the speed—sing it normally once, then start speeding up. After speeding up a few times, suddenly switch and go incredibly slowly. Then follow that with insanely fast, and finally at a speed that you’re constantly changing throughout the song.

The Number Song:

This song is based on the one that appears in the fifth grade Eigo Noto textbook, but can be used for any sequence of ten numbers. The basic rhythm goes: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. 1,2,3,4 ,5,6,7. 8,9,10. 8,9,10. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7!

For 3rd and 4th, this usually becomes the numbers 11-20, while 5th and 6th grade sing 10, 20, 30—through 100. Use flash cards or write these numbers on the board to keep track. After singing this once, you then start removing numbers and replacing them with crazy actions such as clapping instead of the actual number. By the end, the song might sound more like this: 1,clap,3,KARATE CHOP,5,6,huh?. 1,clap,3,KARATE CHOP,5,6,huh?. 8,9,MANIACAL LAUGHTER. 8,9,MANIACAL LAUGHTER. 1,clap,3,KARATE CHOP,5,6,huh?.

The ABC Song:

Like the number song, only instead of numbers, you use the alphabet. Sing the alphabet through once normally, then when finished, remove a bunch of the letters and replace them all with one action. So for example, the second time through, you might clap for all the missing letters. Afterward, replace the missing letters and remove new ones, then come up with a new action to fill the blanks. A variation on this is to combine both upper and lower cases, so that you have a mixed alphabet on the board—ie: A, b, C, D, e, F, g. Then, instead of removing letters, you simply have the students perform an action only when they see an upper case letter or vice versa. This usually works best with the 6th grade, as that’s when they’re now formally required to start learning both cases in Eigo Note.

The Keyword Game:

Two or three students sit around a small object, usually an eraser. The teacher starts running randomly through the list of vocabulary, having the students repeat after them. Once they hear the keyword—the word the teacher has told them to listen for specifically, the students try to grab the eraser. Whoever is fastest wins that round. The teacher then selects a new word from the list and the game continues.

The Snake and Mouse Game –Hebi to Nezumi

This is exactly like the keyword game, except that instead of an eraser in the center, you have the students divided into pairs with one as the snake and as the mouse. Both hold out their hands, the mouse in a fist and the snake with the palm open like a claw ready to grab the fist. Upon hearing the keyword, the snake makes a lunge at the fist, while the mouse tries to pull their fist away without being grabbed. The snake wins if they grab the fist, and the mouse if they get away.

Have the students alternate every turn or two so that no one is always the snake or the mouse. Once they get the hang of it, have the students form groups of three (or more if necessary), so that now each will have to play as both the snake and mouse simultaneously—ie: left hand snake, right hand mouse. This makes the game more hectic and fun as the kids have to coordinate pulling away with one hand as they lunge with the other.

Hot Potato

An excellent warm-up or review game. Divide the class into groups of six or seven and arrange each group into a circle. Each group has an object—a ball, toy, stuffed animal, etc—and the teacher has a timer with an unknown number of seconds entered. When the teacher yells “go!” the timer begins to count down. The students must say an English word before passing the object to the next person, once the timer reaches zero, whoever is holding the object at that time must sit down. Then, a new time is entered and the game continues. This is an easy and quick way to practice new vocabulary or review already-learned words and can be played from 1st to 6th grade. Make sure to say tell the students they can’t say the same word twice in a row. Another variation, if the game is being used for review, is to stipulate that they must say a different topic than the person before them; for example, if one student says “banana,” the next can’t follow that up with “apple.” Last student standing in each group wins.

Number/Date Elimination Game

Another excellent warm-up/review game, this is particularly effective for the fifth and sixth grade lessons on days of the month and counting to the number twenty. Divide the class into smaller groups of about 6 students. The point of the game is to count from one to twenty (in the 5th grade lesson), or from the first to the thirty-first (for the 6th grade lesson), using from between one to three numbers at a time. So for example in the 5th grade lesson, the first student might say “one, two, three,” the second student “four,” the third “five, six” and so on up to twenty. Whichever student ends up saying “twenty” (or “thirty-first”) must sit down, and the game starts again with the remaining students.

Classroom games

Lucky Card Game

Use to practice any dialogue. Pass out one trump card to every student, the HR, and yourself. Tell them they can’t look at the cards. For 4 to 5 minutes, the students must go around the classroom, finding friends and practicing the dialogue. After they finish, they exchange cards without looking at the cards. Then they find a new friend and repeat. When time runs out, the kids return to their desks and you tell them to look at their cards. Whoever has the same card number as the teachers gets to receive a sticker, but only after performing the dialogue in front of the class.

Quick Draw Game

Use this game to practice any vocabulary. Make small flashcards of the vocabulary. Pass out 4-5 cards to each student. Tell students not to look at their cards. Students find a friend and together say, “1, 2, 3, Go!” and whip out a card. The first student to say his or her partner’s card gets to keep the card. If they say it in unison, they play rock, paper, scissors. Use a time limit. The student to collect the most cards wins.

Class-wide Old Maid (Babanuki)

Use for Food lesson to practice “What would you like?” dialogue. Print out twice the number of small cards as you have students, and put a small sticker on two of them to mark them as the “old maid” cards. Pass out two cards to each student. Start the time and have students find a partner and say the dialogue, using the cards in their hand to answer (i.e.- I’d like a soda and hamburger please). Then each student in the pair picks one of their partner’s cards, without being able to see the front of the card. The students with the “old maid” cards at the end must present the dialogue in front of the class.

Epicenter game (shingenchi)

Use this for the Gesture Lesson. Have students sit in a circle and decide who will be “The Oni”. The Oni must walk out of the room for a minute so that the teacher can decide who gets to be the instigator (shingenchi) of all the gestures. Once everyone knows (except the Oni), the Oni comes back in the room. The instigator starts making a gesture and saying the phrase that goes with it (i.e.- “Come here”) and everyone immediately copies him. The instigator can then change to a different gesture whenever he or she wants, but everyone must quickly change too. The Oni must figure out who the instigator is. The Oni can guess up to three people, who reply either “No!” if he's wrong, or “BINGO!” if he's right.

Color Touch Tag game

Use the game for the Color Lesson. One student is the Oni and the other students all ask him, “What color do you like?” He or she answers “I like blue!” All of the students quickly look around the classroom for something blue and touch it before the Oni catches them. If caught, they become the new Oni. Make sure to tell the students that they cannot run around the classroom (walk quickly), and that two people cannot touch the same object at one time.

Conversation Relay

Line up the students in two teams and have the last student in each team tap the shoulder of the student in front and have a conversation E.g. "What's your name?", "How are you?". The student answering then starts the same conversation with the student in front, and so on. When the conversation reaches the front, the student at the front must run to the back and continue the procedure. The first team to get all the students back in their original positions wins.

Food Black Jack

Print out a lot of pictures of the different foods and drinks you are studying for the food unit (or use the flashcards, but its good to have more than one of each item). On the back of each picture attach a sticky note with a price on it from $1 to $10. Use cellophane tape to stick all of the pictures on the chalkboard. Split the class into two teams. Give $10 in fake money to each team. Have the first student from each team come up and play rock, paper, scissors. The loser asks “What would you like?” and the winner must point to the food item he or she wants and answer “_____ please!” without knowing the actual price of the item. The loser takes down the picture, looks at the price on the back, and says “Thats ~ dollars please.” The team then has to pay for the food item with the money they have. Then the next person from each team comes up and switch roles so each team has a turn ordering. The team to use as close to $10 as possible is the winner. If a team ends up using more than $10, they automatically lose!

Hangman

Use review words from past lessons. The teacher chooses a word and writes the appropriate number of spaces on the board. Students guess a letter one by one. If the student guesses correctly, write that letter in the space and give the student another turn. If they guess wrongly, start drawing a hanging man and have the next student guess a letter. Let the first student to guess the word take the teacher's place. You may prefer to draw a hanging spider (Spiderman?) instead.

Evolution Game (Animals)

All students start out as a snake. They go around making "hissing noises" until they bump into another snake and play rock, paper, scissors. The winner gets to evolve into a frog. Then the frogs must go around making ribbit noises until they meet another frog, play janken, and evolve into a rabbit. Rabbit evolves into an ostrich-->monkey-->human being. When the kids have evolved into humans, they win!

Body ball relay

When reviewing body words, have a relay game! The first two kids in each line stand up. You show both teams one flash card (i.e.- head). When the kids say the English word out loud, give them a plush toy or soccer ball. Each teams' pair must balance the toy between that body part (i.e. their heads), walk around a target and come back to their line. It is really fun to watch giggling kids try to do this!

Clothing Race

Use for the Clothing Lesson. Prepare a basket of clothing with 2 articles of each clothing item (two shirts, 2 pairs of socks, 2 hats, etc.) and put it in front of the classroom. Students split into two teams, make lines towards the back of the classroom, and sit down. The first student in each line stands up and faces their lines/the back of the class. The ALT and HR take turns picking out a clothing flashcard and showing it to everyone except the two students standing up. On the count of 3, everyone asks together, “Do you have ___?” filling in the blank with the clothing flashcard the teacher is holding. The students who are standing up then turn around, look in the basket for the clothing article said, and race to put them on. The first to successfully put the hat, dress, socks, etc. on win one point for their team.