Playing Games {Part 1}

As I've mentioned in a few previous posts, we spent our last couple weeks of school learning about games.  This topic was based on student interest, and it turned out to be a great focus for the end of the year.

Connect 4 (front) and Guess Who (back)

Each day during our designated "center" time, students had the opportunity to rotate to 4-5 different games.  Students were in groups of 2 or 4, as I have 18 kiddos and many games need no more than 4 players, but some games need partners. Groups changed daily to allow students to practice their "getting along skills" with different combinations of people as well. I think frequently kiddos forget these skills we've built throughout the year!

Top-It (war)  We played this in partners, so had 2 games going at ones.  Some groups took on the challenge of building the biggest number by turning over 2 cards at a time.  These are number card decks from Everyday Math that we used to use.  The card decks go to 20.

Each day, students journaled about what games they played, what they learned and how they got along with the members of their groups.  I don't have any pictures of this, but I made a little journal page for them where they listed the games they played, wrote a sentence or two about what they learned and colored in faces to show how well they got along.

Trouble was one of their favorites!

Have you played Spot It?  Google and I did some searching for the best games for kiddos who are 5-6 years old.  I wanted games that they could play together and things they most likely haven't played before.  Spot It was great because kiddos that weren't good at other games could shine at this game.  You look at your card and find the 1 symbol on your card that is the same on the card in the middle (only 1 matches).  You say the name of the symbol that matches then that card in the middle becomes "your card".  You are still looking for the one symbol that matches.  When all cards are gone, you count to see who has the most cards.  They loved this game- as in begged for it to be in the rotation daily.

Some of the games that I didn't seem to get pictures of are: Sorry, Spoons (very entertaining), and Rory's Story Cubes.  I was surprised how much they enjoyed Rory's Story Cubes.  Our tech teacher let us borrow this game because she thought they might like it and ended up donating it to the class because it was a hit.

I taught a group to play Scrabble Jr. while other were making video games.  More on the video games in another post.  These kiddos then taught their teammates how to play the game during centers.

My kiddos also had the opportunity to "play" with the mazes they created during our map unit.  You can read more about that here. They were excited to try out the mazes other groups made.

I will be back in another post to share more about games that we made.  I thought this was its own "beast" to tackle.

I'd love to build my stock of games for next year.  What are some of your students' favorite games?