Games to Play During Remote Learning or Physically Distanced Learning

Games, brain breaks, Morning Meeting activities, and community building exercises are a vital part of learning in our 3rd grade classroom. I’ve (Nina) been thinking a lot about how we can continue to incorporate games and brain breaks even when teaching over video or while staying six feet apart. Here are some of the ideas we came up with - Gabby is the game genius, so I asked her to help me brainstorm! We came up with two lists, which are below. I tried to link to a description or provide it myself unless it seems really self-explanatory, but if anything is not clear, please comment below and we will give you more details.

On live video (Zoom, Google hangouts, etc)

Keep in mind that a whiteboard with names or teams behind you where you can show them their points and keep updating it or keep track of rounds, etc. will help many of these! Also, depending on your setup, many of these games would also work in person and physically distanced!

• Name and a movement! (and then the group does it back to you) as a fun greeting 

• 20 questions (younger students often need a refresher on what is a “yes or no question” and practice re-wording their questions to fit their criterion).

• Mystery number (or country, city, classmate, food, letter/sound, book, etc): like 20 questions but more subject focused. Great way to practice Math notation! 

• Mystery voice! - all students look away from the camera (in the classroom, close their eyes until the teacher has told them to stop) and the teacher chooses a student to be the ‘mystery voice’. The teacher gives the mystery voice the thumbs up to speak and they say the agreed upon sentence (ours was, “I am an awesome third grader”) while all classmates continue to have eyes closed and the mystery voice student also closes their eyes to blend back in with the group. The teacher says, “Okay, eyes open, raise your hand if you have a guess for who is the mystery voice!”. Take 3 guesses and see if the mystery voice student can win! We found this was a great way to integrate fun adjectives to elevate vocabulary (enigmatic, deceptive etc.) while providing praise. It was also a fun way to settle into a nice (anticipatory) quiet, and let kids be creative and silly (with structure). 

• Dance break (not a game, but fun!) 

• Great Wind Blows (can’t do the walking around part, but could raise your hands and then pick someone to go next)

• Telling a story where each person adds a sentence (teacher or volunteer student who is old enough could type it and share their screen so everyone can follow along)

• Mad libs

• Simon Says: a classic movement break! You may need to operate on the honor system and let students decide when they are out. 

• “Hangman” but make it less violent and change the name/ complete a different image (like a cute simple dog face!) when they guess the wrong letters to fill in the blanks. 

• Jeopardy (need to set up questions beforehand)

• Pictionary (person who is drawing draws on paper and everyone else pins that video)

• Charades (same as pictionary but you act it out in front of your webcam)

  • Reverse charades (everyone acts one thing out and the teacher or one student has to guess what the group is doing by looking at everyone’s frames! This sounds hilarious to us. You also might have experienced this as “Heads Up” played on someone’s phone.) 

• Scattegories (pick 3 categories, 3 letters.. Would need to send them the paper to fill in their boxes) 

• I Spy (using your camera’s frame and you can set up a little scene) 

• Press conference (one person ‘leaves’ and the rest of the group decides who that person will be (someone famous or familiar that everyone knows). When the person “returns,” members of the group asks them questions (which also give them hints about their pretend identity) and they have to answer the questions and try and guess who they are. They usually get 3 guesses. 

• I’m going on a trip…: Students have to guess the pattern of what you’re bringing with you. This is so much fun and once students get the hang of it, they will volunteer to be the leader.

• Emotions Game: someone acts out emotions or you have to guess the emotion based on the image or a peer’s facial expression on video! This might be fun in teams with a timer (20 seconds for each emotion or acting out, etc).

While physically distancing:

All of these games can be played while staying six feet apart. However, we’d recommend having some kind of virtual (dots, carpet squares, tape on the floor) so students know where to stand. You might want to practice staying on your spots before you jump into a game and have a signal or word for when students need to check if they are still on their spots.

• Vegetable off: two students face off. The teacher asks the audience for an adjective and a vegetable (audience members whisper their suggestions or write them down so the competing kids can’t hear them). Then you count down, 3, 2, 1, and announce the adjective and vegetable (for example, “nervous green bean!) and the competing kids both have to embody a nervous green bean. We usually only give them 5-10 seconds with a verbal countdown as this can be hard to keep up. This would be terrifyingly awful for shy kiddos so maybe just keep this one as kids who volunteer, but it is always good for getting everyone laughing and awake! We have used it as a tie breaker at the end of a game when there are 2 kids left as the winners. 

• Read My Mind: (this is a game for kids in pairs). Put your thumb up when you have your word, countdown from 3 and both say your word at the same time. For example, I might say “shoes” and you might say “cheese.” On our next round, we need to try to think about what word might combine elements of shoes and cheese. We are trying to get to the same word over time through associations.

• Splash or Splat

• Zip Zap Zoom 

• Freeze dance: this is a classic! Play music and when the music stops, the last person to freeze is out. You may want to give students a box or circle to dance in to help them maintain physical distancing. 

• Wah 

• Heads Up, Seven Up: another classic! I remember playing this in elementary school. You would need to find a way to modify the tapping the thumb step (perhaps tapping with your foot three times or moving something with your foot), but ask your students to think of solutions that could work with staying 6+ feet apart and I know they will have lots of creative ideas.

• Around the World (we’ve done this with math facts, vocabulary, and geography!) 

• Bippity Bippity Bop 

• Look up, Look down 

• Who’s the leader?/Coseeki 

• Rock Paper Scissors Evolution: I’ve also played this with students where the loser becomes part of the winner’s entourage and cheers them on. That might be really hard with physical distancing though as the game ends with two large groups of people each cheering on their champion. 

Hope this list brings some moments of joy to your classroom (virtual or physical)! Please share any others as we’d love new ideas to try out. One last plug - Responsive Classroom always has new ideas and resources for Morning Meeting activities/games as well.

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Back to School Activities for Distance Learning

I (Nina) am preparing to go back to work after my extended maternity leave. This is shaping up to be an unpredictable and unprecedented school year, but I hope my students and I can still find joy in learning and getting to know each other. My school has decided that we will start the year fully remote, although we are small (and independent) so we are lucky to have an option of some in-person small group meetings to meet students and parents, do some technology training, and distribute materials at the beginning of the year.

Conceptualizing distance learning has been challenging for me. In August of 2018, I wrote about some of my favorite ideas to start the school year and I am trying to think about how I can still do some of those activities with my students, maybe with a new twist! I try to think about the purpose of the activity and how we can still achieve the essence of it in a new way. 

Here are some ideas:

• Names! Name activities are the best. They provide an opportunity for you to learn about your students and ask them how they would like to be addressed in class. They also create a chance for you to share something about yourself while learning about students’ identities. They are my absolute favorite and I am excited to brainstorm ways they can still work:

  • Create your Name: this activity was inspired by SEED. Have your students create their name in a way that feels good to them, using whatever materials they have on hand. You can explain the activity by modeling how you created your own name (using scrap paper or whatever else you have around the house). I used to take students’ photos holding their “name masterpieces” and put those up outside our classroom, but you could have students submit photos of their work and share them, or even put photos of their “name masterpieces” together into a collage and make it your virtual background (or if you have a way of collecting physical papers from your students, put them up on your wall, but this seems complicated). Here are some digital collage resources, and I’ve also used Google Photos to do something similar in the past. I love the idea of creating a collage (virtually or otherwise) as it’s important for students to see all their names together and know you are still a classroom community. It’s also great for new students as this way everyone knows how they would like to be addressed.

  • Name Stories: these are always fascinating, validating, and so much fun! I always introduce name stories with a read aloud (see name related read aloud ideas below), and then give students prompts to interview each other and ask about the story of their name. Interviewing each other on live video might not be possible, but you can have students interview a family member about how they got their name. Some great questions to give students to start with: Who chose my name?  Why did they choose this name for me? Am I named after someone?  What does my name mean or what significance does it have?  What do you like about my name?  After the interview (which you can skip depending on logistics), students can write their “name story.” This is a wonderful activity to get to know students and students enjoy it as well because they can share as much as they like or choose to focus on one aspect of their name that feels good to them.

  • Class “My Name” Poem: This extension of name stories is a great way to build community. I’ve participated in this activity as part of a group of adults, and we loved it and felt more connected afterward. Ask each student to choose one sentence from their name story to share. If you are in person, you can have students write their sentences on a post-it. If not, they can simply read it aloud or post it on Seesaw, Google Docs, etc if you are using that type of tech. I liked having each student read their sentence aloud and then I would type them or write them down, but it can be hard to keep up, so it’s nice to have them submit their sentences as well. Once you have all their sentences (don’t forget to include one of yours!), sit down with them when your students are elsewhere and arrange them into a poem. Later, share the poem with your students. They will love hearing their sentence and appreciating what the class created together.

  • What’s Your Name Worth? This is a great Math activity that helped me start the year by seeing how my 3rd grade mathematicians approached a puzzle. For 3rd graders, we gave them a chart showing all of the letters in the alphabet and a corresponding value in cents (for example, a is worth one cent, b is worth 2 cents, etc), but you can create your own chart with negative and positive values, Math problems, or really whatever works for you and your students. Once students found the value of their name, they could choose a teacher’s or family member’s name and then had to try and find names worth exactly twenty five cents or a dollar. Again, this is something they could work on independently and then either verbally share what their name is worth or post it on a website.

  • Name related read alouds (for the chapter books, you can read an excerpt of the relevant part): A House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jackie Woodson, Thunderboy Jr. by Sherman Alexie, The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi, The Favorite Daughter by Allen Say, My Name is Yoon by Helen Recorvits and Gabi Swiatkowska, My Name is Maria Isabel by Alma Flor Ada - and there are so many more!

• Start a read aloud: We start a chapter book on the first day of school and it engages students in a shared reading experience from the very beginning of our time together. We read Save Me a Seat for our first read aloud last year and it was a perfect back to school book that fit into so many of the things we talked about (our needs as learners, our classroom contract, goal setting, appropriate challenge, and more)

• I Wish My Teachers Knew: give your students the opportunity to share their thoughts and concerns with you. This year, this is more important than ever!

• Numbers Important to Me: we use this activity to introduce our Math binders. In the past, we made the cover of our Math binders our “Numbers Important to Me” pages, but this year they could be shared virtually or displayed at home. Students write (and decorate) numbers and why they are important to them. For example, “5 - because I have 5 people in my family.” Make sure you make an example about yourself so your students can learn about you as well. This can be done on paper or on a computer - whatever works best for you and your students!

• Top Ten Lists: read the first chapter of The Top Ten Ways to Ruin the First Day of School for inspiration and then make a “Top Ten Things to Know About [insert your name]” list. Again, make an example to share! Students LOVE reading these about each other, so would be great to share virtually. If you want to do a live share, I’d suggest telling each student to choose ONE thing about themselves to share.

• Letter to Yourself: this can be a wonderful first day or week homework assignment (for older students) or an in class activity. Have students write letters to themselves making predictions about the school year. In the past, we would seal them in individual envelopes, put them away, and then give to students on the last day of school, but this year, you could have students email you letters or submit documents however works for you, and still either send them back to them or print them and hand them back (if we are in person again) at the end of the school year. This can also be a great tool for goal setting! I’d suggest creating an example that you wrote talking about how this year is new for you and what you are going to work on as this will be excellent modeling for students.

• Hopes & Dreams: set hopes and dreams for this school year. I always model with one of my own and try to have one that is social emotional focused and one that is about learning or trying something new. You could explicitly model to students how you modified your hopes and dreams for this year in a new setting or format. Later, use your students’ hopes and dreams to move into creating classroom rules and goal setting (more ideas and details are available from Responsive Classroom).

• Guess Who?: have students send in three “clues” about themselves (tell them beforehand that these should be things they are comfortable sharing) and every day, have a different “mystery student” where you share the clues throughout the day and take guesses about which student you are learning about! You may want to ask for more than three clues and then only share three in case the clues are too obvious or something you’d rather not share.

• Reader Survey: I’ve found that my students love filling out surveys online (we usually use Google Forms). I get so much more information from them through this medium, although they often use emojis to express themselves as well. Make a survey to get to know your students as readers. This is extra important right now as reading is one thing we can encourage students to do as an academic activity, but also something fun to do when other fun options are mostly off limits. Since we won’t be able to recommend books to students in person, knowing them as readers so we can try to recommend books through online platforms or the public library (ours in DC are open now with mostly “take out” service) is so important.

• Daily Life Word/Story Problems: this is a great way to model how we incorporate Math into our daily lives. Start by sharing some you wrote about your day. I’ve discovered that students love anything about babies and pets (don’t we all?). For example, I gave my baby 17 pieces of mango. He dropped 5 on the floor, put 2 in his hair, gave 1 to me, and ate the rest. How many pieces of mango did he eat? After you share, give students an assignment to write some of their own, and then during your next class (or later in class), they can share their problems and discuss different ways to solve them and “prove” their answer is correct.

• Share a photo: this depends on your comfort level and what you feel is most appropriate for your students. My co-teacher and I are sending our students a photo postcard of us (email or posting on a site would work too) so they can see our faces before the school year begins and get a nice note from us welcoming them to our class. If you are sharing photos virtually, it might be nice to send multiple photos showing how you are getting ready for the school year.

There are, of course, so many more ideas and possibilities, so please comment below with any of your go-to beginning of the school year activities and tips for modifications! If you are starting the year in person or in a hybrid model, any of these activities could still work. Sending strength to all teachers starting this new year, but especially those who still don’t know what their school year will look like, or how they will stay safe and keep their students safe.

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Creating Our Class Contract!

As we near the end of October and my school has its Fall round of conferences with families, I was recently pleased to notice how many of my students use the language of our class contract (rules for our class) in their reflections about how the year is going for them. Creating our contract was a multi-step process starting with a read aloud and ending with a signed contract and accompanying art projects (and of course a shared understanding about the kind of community we want to create).

We started with a read aloud (always a wonderful place to start!). Our first chapter book read aloud of the year is Save Me a Seat by Gita Varadarajan and Sarah Weeks. We read a few chapters and a day and do a variety of responses to our reading to help us empathize with the characters. The main characters’ negative experiences at school provide a contrast as we think about how we want to make each other feel at school.

However, to specifically start our conversation about our class contract (and community) we read The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael Lopez. (This is a new picture book and it is gorgeous! We highly encourage you to read it yourself.) After we read this book, we ask students what we should have on our contract to make sure everyone feels welcome to share their stories and be themselves in our class. We also remind students of their Hopes and Dreams (which we created a few days before) and think about what we need in our classroom to make these come true.

Next, students brainstormed in pairs about their ideas for the class contract. Then, they had time to work independently and wrote down a few of their ideas on a notecard. We reminded students to make positive statements (tell what we should do) and think about the most important things to include.

The next step is to filter the ideas down to bigger ideas so that everyone’s contribution is included, but we also don’t have a contract with 50 rules! We try to show students our process so it is transparent. We do this by listing the final statements we came up with in bold and sorting all of our students’ suggestions under the relevant statement. For example, don’t be territorial went under “know your place.”

The final version of our class contract!

We ended up with 5 statements. The final number of statements can be more or less depending on your students’ ages, but 5 statements are comprehensive enough to cover everything and brief enough to easily remember. We should also mention that this process is Responsive Classroom inspired!

Our final step was sharing our final contract. Everyone in our class signed it (in fancy metallic Sharpie!) to show their commitment to upholding it. When we say everyone, this includes other adults in the building! We also asked students to think about what the contract means to them and pick at least one component of our contract to exemplify through art. They could use foil, popsicle sticks, paper, glue, markers, crayons, and more (really anything we had in the room). Students worked hard to conceptualize something that was important to them from the contract, and we took photos of them with their finished products. Now, our contract and all of our artwork graces a wall in our classroom!

All year, we keep going back to the same language that is in our contract. We notice when we are following it, when we could follow it better, use it to redirect students, use it in our Morning Message, use it on our conference prep social emotional reflection, and more!

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Looking Back to Look Forward

As the beginning of the new school year approaches (or Teachers’ New Year, as I like to call it), memories and reflections from last year always pop up as we decide what we want to keep, adapt, and get rid of as we start anew. This year, Gabby and I are moving from teaching 5th grade to teaching 3rd grade, so the calculation is even more complex.

The first way we close the year is by literally closing a book. We also finished our class read aloud, Walk Two Moons, on the very last day of school, which felt perfect - Walk Two Moons (if you haven’t read it, RUN and pick it up!) has a complex, multi-faceted ending with lots of emotions, just like the end of the school year. It also reminded me for the umpteenth time how much I love read alouds and how they are an essential teaching and learning tool, but also wonderful for community building because we all grow to care about the characters and wonder what will happen next together. In fifth grade, read aloud is a fun and touching reminder of how young our students are - when they are listening intently and their eyes widen at a cliff-hanger, they forget about being “cool” and almost in middle school and are children again. Multiple students asked for reassurance that we would finish the read aloud before the year ended - even students who tried really hard throughout the year to make it known that they, “don’t like to read.”

Our literal ‘looking’ back together with our class is a photo slideshow. The slideshow we make is comprised of group photos, exciting things we experienced together like field trips, funny moments, photos with visitors, and proud moments (publishing parties, sharing our Social Studies projects, etc). I used kizoa to set it up and the students love the special effects and soundtrack, but really any photo slideshow recapping the year would probably have the desired effect. Students excitedly comment on photos, remember projects they loved (and were challenged by), and laugh at the silly group photos. Thinking back on our students’ reactions, I am reminded how community building in the classroom is so important and is an essential first step of back to school life.

And we end the reflective time together with a class poem that Gabby and I write for them. Each stanza is about one student and has memories, inside jokes, and champions their growth over the school year. We read it together and take turns (we like to think this is very dramatic!) and each year we find it is our best way of sincerely sharing our love for them and sending each student off with our best wishes. This past year, after we read the poem we wrote, we gave the students a break to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. One student came back to report that two other students were in the bathroom crying because the poem made them feel so emotional. I went to check on them, and they hugged me and said this year was amazing and the poem reminded them of everything wonderful about it.

My favorite part of the poem (apart from the slightly ridiculous rhymes we manage to pull off) is watching students react to it. When they hear their name and personalized stanza, they look amazed (and very young all over again). It is such a satisfying culmination of our time together. In third grade, we will definitely have to keep up this tradition! We also will have to continue to focus on goal setting and reflecting on our learning, as we often reference something students have learned or worked on in their personalized stanza. The specificity of the way we name their actions and hard work really resonates with students and makes it clear how much we honor their efforts.

We are entering another school year after a summer which has been eventful and frequently painful for many. We are gearing up for the lessons on skills, but also the necessary tough conversations. And looking back, we’re reminded that think these touchstones that closed our community with full hearts last year, will probably (most definitely) transfer to being important things we bring to 3rd grade!

As we look forward, we will take with us the excitement of shared community stories, the wonderful fun of documenting and focusing on the process (NOT the product) of the year, and the importance of telling our students that we hear them, we see them, and we care for them.

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