Bomb games are fun, but they can take forever to make, and that's unpaid time.

But all in all, I'd just like to mix things up more, so I'm looking for games that don't take any prep (or at least very minimal, ideally one-time, prep).

Any thoughts? Where can I find some ideas?

This would be for elementary classes with between eight and 24 students.

Bomb games are fun, but they can take forever to make, and that's unpaid time.

But all in all, I'd just like to mix things up more, so I'm looking for games that don't take any prep (or at least very minimal, ideally one-time, prep).

Any thoughts? Where can I find some ideas?

This would be for elementary classes with between eight and 24 students.

Yep, I make most of my games with that idea in mind - fun and little prep time.
An even bigger problem with bomb games though is that they are all the same.  We need a little bit more diversity - and it seems like very few people here have good ideas on new game concepts. 

By the way, the best thing people can do about the lack of diverse and easy to prep games is to make new games themselves.  I'd argue that the number of people skilled in making bomb games has shrunk very significantly in the past couple of years.

I don't know how well it will work for elementary, but at the middle school level my go to easy, no prep time game is a sentence writing game. Basically I take one or two vocabulary words and make them write a sentence using those words. the first team to complete a sentence that is grammatically correct gets 2 points. Any team that writes a grammatically correct sentence gets 1 point, and the team that writes the craziest, silliest, weirdest sentence, gets 3 points. I like the crazy sentence thing because it forces them to think of the vocab outside of the wrote textbook answers.

All you need are small white boards or even just a blackboard.

Quote from: maximmm on August 22, 2017, 01:44:55 AM

Quote from: oatmealkooky on August 21, 2017, 08:46:03 PM

Bomb games are fun, but they can take forever to make, and that's unpaid time.

But all in all, I'd just like to mix things up more, so I'm looking for games that don't take any prep (or at least very minimal, ideally one-time, prep).

Any thoughts? Where can I find some ideas?

This would be for elementary classes with between eight and 24 students.

Yep, I make most of my games with that idea in mind - fun and little prep time.
An even bigger problem with bomb games though is that they are all the same.  We need a little bit more diversity - and it seems like very few people here have good ideas on new game concepts. 

By the way, the best thing people can do about the lack of diverse and easy to prep games is to make new games themselves.  I'd argue that the number of people skilled in making bomb games has shrunk very significantly in the past couple of years.

The trick to bomb games is to make the questions and answers more dynamic, for example:

- Set up a Jenga tower, whenever a team gets X amount of points, someone has to take X amount of blocks from the Jenga tower. If it falls, their team loses 5 points or something. Points become a double edged sword.

- Have questions like, "Your team has 20sec to collect 5 things starting with the letter S", or "Do a roleplay with a team member and order a pizza over the phone, you'll get 1-3 points"

There is indeed a way to make bomb games be more dynamic by diversifying the questions.  In fact, the first and only bomb game that I've ever made comprised of simple question/answer slides, 'memory game' questions and snatch the sentence mini games.  At the end of the day, however - editing bomb games takes too long and is far from being time efficient, unless you work in only one school and teach the same lesson to more than one class (a long, long time ago, in a province far, far away, we used to teach same lesson 6 times a week to 6 different 6th grade classes). 

I have a ton of games and stuff that aren't bomb games: auctions, maze games, sentence scrambles, maze games and fun stuff I've never seen on waygook.

I just tried uploading but there's too much and the files are too large. Any advice on where I can stick all this and post descriptions? As they're not bomb games, they need a little explaining.

Here's a preview:
Hungry Monster (simple feelings game grades 1-3)
Teacher says 1 - 2 - 3 and kids chant "How are you today". The teacher answers by reading what's on the slide (in monster voice if you're cool and creating as much suspense as possible)
If the monster is hungry, the kids have to dive under the table. If they don't, and you "catch" them, their team can lose a life or a point or whatever. Equally if they hide when the monster isn't hungry, they'll lose out.
Kids love this game and always request it. I like to play it at the end of class if they've been good. Works great for big classes like yours. Also I made this when I was a powerpoint noob.

use google drive

 I stopped playing bomb games and 80 % of my classroom management problems disappeared.

I don't know how well it will work for elementary, but at the middle school level my go to easy, no prep time game is a sentence writing game. Basically I take one or two vocabulary words and make them write a sentence using those words. the first team to complete a sentence that is grammatically correct gets 2 points. Any team that writes a grammatically correct sentence gets 1 point, and the team that writes the craziest, silliest, weirdest sentence, gets 3 points. I like the crazy sentence thing because it forces them to think of the vocab outside of the wrote textbook answers.

All you need are small white boards or even just a blackboard.

Love this idea. I think it would be great to use along with whatever grammar structure the students are learning in any particular lesson. Using the two words you give them, they must make a sentence using one of the grammar structures they learning about.

I saw this idea floating around another thread and it is one of my students favorite things to do at the end of class. The 6 letter word game. Here's how it works:
Come up with a word that is 6 letters. e.g 'ORANGE'. Students then have to come up with 6 words beginning with those letters that are 6 letters long (they can't use orange for the first word). The first student to finish wins. To choose the next word, have the winner roll a die. Whatever the number is will be that number on the winning student's paper. e.g. number 3 will use the 3rd word on his or her list. To make it more difficult, you can say that repeat words from previous rounds are not allowed. You can also specify that they only use nouns, verbs etc. for each round. If they are struggling, I let them use their books to find words as well.

I've used a no-tech game called Stop! (very similar to Scattergories) which my students absolutely love. And I teach some classes with dead-pan, no-fun, too-cool-for-school middle school graders.

I just posted it, if you're interested; http://www.waygook.org/index.php/topic,108610.msg723167/topicseen.html#new


I'll post the PowerPoint with the instructions here too just in case.

Pictionary has been a big hit with my elementary kids.
Stop the bus is good as well. Really makes them think
Letter tiles - I put students in groups and gave each group 3 letter tiles. They then had to list as many words as possible in a given amount of time for each letter. If they're a higher level class then you could get them to only write words that use all three letters.