Games for the Beginning of School

August 14, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Those first few days of school are not days for getting a lot done. They’re for getting to know each other, learning classroom rules, and getting back into the groove of being in a classroom all day long.

So why not throw in some games that will have kids working together and having some fun together?

The list of beginning of school activities from A Grace-Filled Classroom aren’t all games necessarily, but it does include one of my favorites, which is the beach ball toss where you write different questions on the ball and then toss it. The question your hand lands on is the one you answer. There’s also a printable “find a friend” (variation on person bingo) in the linked post.

This escape room for the classroom from Teachers Are Terrific (available at Teachers Pay Teachers) is perfect for fourth and fifth grade and will get kids up and moving. As described on the blog:

In this Escape Room, students match words to categories and then unscramble a message for the first lock code. For the second task, students complete a math puzzler to open the locked box. For the last task, they use a secret code to decipher a message that will lead them to the lock numbers.

The STEM challenge comes from kids choosing from available materials to illustrate a class rule in a physical way.

Proud to Be Primary has a great list of getting to know you games (including the beach ball one above), including asking questions with the roll of a dice or the color of candies, making paper dolls for each student and much more. These are great, relatively low-prep ideas you can do with kids when you need to fill time or just want to do a group activity.

Do you have a favorite beginning of school game to do with your kids? Let’s hear about it!

Next Plan Idea:

Activities and Ideas for the 100th Day of School

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Sun Activities for Kids

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

Next Plan Idea:

Have you read?

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