Versatile and Sentence Heavy Games

[catcatcat]

I've been teaching kindergartners in China for only a couple of months now. With little prior training, I've spend many nights searching and searching for new games and activities to use with my kids. There's a lot of really great stuff out there, and I've been having tons of fun trying new things with my classes. But to get over some of the exhaustion of constantly looking for something new, I've been trying to streamline past activities that have gone really well for a variety of uses. Because I play them so often, the kids know how they work, so set up and explanations are very minimal. My school uses Fingerprints, so I'm often teaching vocab words within some sort of key sentence. It’s been really important that these games then be able to exercise the use of sentence structure. These are my top three, go-to activities of which I know I can plug in a sentence without fussing too much with the original construction of the activity:

Tornado Game – T lays all flashcards in a line on the floor and tells Ss to close their eyes. T hides a card with a tornado on it under one of the flashcards. T and Ss go through all the cards on at a time, turning them over, trying to find the tornado card. Ss have to say the word or sentence before we can turn over a card.. When we find the tornado card, T screams "tornado!" whirling arms around, flailing, ect. Ss do this, too, so it's pretty cute. I have Ss take turns telling the class to "close/open your eyes" and hide the tornado, too.

We also do relay races, where I split the group up with an even number of students on either side of the classroom. One side are runners, and the others are lined up with flashcards in hand. T does a countdown and the first runner has to run to a kid on the other side of the classroom to ask a question like, "what do you have?" The S being questioned has to answer according to their flashcard, so, "I have an apple," ect. They then grab hands and run back to the other side of the classroom together. Then the next runner can go, and so on. If there are only a couple of kids, and their moms are in the classroom, I do the same set up but have all the kids as runners. Then the kids can run up to their mom and say something like, "I have pants!", or whatever. Moms like this, too.

Passing Game – T and S sit in a circle. I get out a stuffed animal to pass around. Each time someone is passed the animal, they have to say a sentence, or answer a question from the person that's passing it. This exercises the same Q & A structure like the relay races.

I’m really interested in hearing what other teachers find to be versatile, sentence heavy games. These are always a life saver for me, and I can usually leave a class feeling like everyone got to engage with the material, even if it’s a 20+ mob of 3-year-olds!