How to Lead Educational Games

As a classroom teacher, you always want your students to be learning. These educational games provide a different kind of learning experience for students and require little preparation on your part. These activities are useful when you are waiting to go somewhere as a class, if you are unexpectedly covering another class or as a reward for good behavior. The non-interactive games can also be modified and used to keep students occupied if they finish an assignment early.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Overhead/chalkboard/whiteboard
• Top-40 song list
• "24" cards (or notes)
• Newspapers

1. Have students practice vocabulary and spelling with an anagrams contest. Depending on your students’ age and how much time you have, put a word, phrase, or sentence on the board (this could be something related to your students or an upcoming event: “GOOD LUCK ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS TEST," for example). Have students work in groups or individually to see how many words they can create from the letters in this phrase (they get as many of each letter as are physically written on the board). You can make this a contest by either awarding points per word, or by awarding points only for words no other student/team has (this method takes a while to score).
2. Each week, print a list of the top 40 songs on the radio (or in the genre most popular among your students). If you discover extra time on your hands, put these up on the board (keeping these on a transparency would be ideal, since then you can display it for the whole class without recopying in larger print). Tell students to write a story that incorporates as many of the song titles as possible (these have to remain in their original form). Whichever students can use the most titles wins.
3. Educational companies produce cards for a game called “24”, which lists a set of four numbers on a card. Students are asked to use different operations to create an expression with these numbers that equals 24. For example, if the numbers on the card were 3, 3, 4 and 1, students could say: 4 + 4 = 8; 8 * 3= 24 24/1 = 24. This expression is written: (3 * (4+4))/1.
   
   If you don’t have a set of 24 cards available, you can come up with a series of numbers on your own (make sure you check these because not all sets of numbers will produce 24) and keep them handy.
4. Use the newspaper. If your community has a free daily newspaper, or if your school has access to multiple copies of a local or student newspaper, bring these into your classroom. If you have extra time, you can distribute them to students for them to read. If you want to keep students accountable for this time, give an assignment for them to respond to what they read. Possible assignments include:
   
   1. Write a diary entry pretending you experienced something you read about in the paper. How do you feel about this event?
   2. Write a letter to the editor describing your opinion on a topic presented in the newspaper.

Tips & Warnings

• Friendly competition can be a good motivator, but you obviously do not need to make these competitions.
• Games obviously don't take the place of planned instructional time. Use these activities sparingly.
• Exercise good judgment. The top 40 list may need to be modified, depending on the age of your students and the genre of music (obviously, some song titles are inappropriate for school). The newspaper may similarly contain questionable material, so, if you are not using an educational newspaper, skim through it before you distribute.