Are you involved in the planning for play and party activities for your school age children? Here are some ideas to help you make your party interesting and fun, without having to worry about how much it is going to cost. It’s also a great learning activity for young children.
Send a note home to parents asking them to send to school a new or gently used book to school with their children. Have them wrap the book in holiday paper and then gather the children up into a circle. You might want to bring a few extra wrapped books in case some parents forget because it’s important that no child be left out of the activity.
Hand each child a wrapped book and then pull out the story or two that you intend to read. A good holiday story or other entertaining tale will do. Now, you need to give your class kids the rules for the game.
Identify a few words and you can even write them on the board. For very young children, keep the list of words short so that they don’t have to try too many. Your list might look something like this:
- the
- and
- a
- Once
- End
You may also want to include a couple of words that are used commonly through the book. If you are reading a Berenstein Bears book, for example, you might use the words: bear, brother, sister, mama and papa.
Tell the children that when they hear these words, they are to pass their book to the person on the right. You can even mix it up along the way, having them pass to the left occasionally. But the point is – it’s a lot of laughs, because at some point, kids are going to forget, pass the wrong way or some of the key words will come fast and they will be exchanging, exchanging, exchanging.
At the end of the story time, the kids get to open up their present and receive their new book. This idea works well for just about any present passing game. It’s a great way to teach kids to focus and pay attention to the story as well as to all the individual words they hear in it.
For example, if you were passing a book during the reading of this blog and your keyword was the and a, you would have passed the book 42 times. And that’s just with two words in a relatively short blog.
Have you played a similar game in the past?
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