Global School Play Day

February 1, 2017 is Global School Play Day! #GSPD is a movement started by a group of educators to promote the importance of the role of unstructured play in learning.
To prepare for the event:

• Visit the Global School Play Day Web Page to register.
• Visit the Global School Play Day Teacher Resource page for a press release, permission slips, expectations for what unstructured play entails, and more.
• Invite students to bring in games from home-without batteries or electronics.

In anticipation of the 2017 #GSPD event, I thought I'd write a post and share some favorite games that I love to play with my class, as well as my reflections on how the event played out in my classroom and some ideas for keeping play in the classroom year round.
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Five Games That I Love That you May not Have Seen Before

1.  A Game of Things

This is a fun guessing game that tests your knowledge of your friends. Everyone makes a list items based on the topic from the card and then players guess who said what. I love this game as a way to build community by finding out how much you have in common with new classmates at the beginning of the year. It's actually great any time of the year though, because I have noticed that middle school age students really enjoy the socialization that goes along with these types of games.

2.  Think-ets: And A new purpose for Some random Game pieces 

I found this game in the gift shop at The Exploratorium in San Francisco. There are several ways to play, but the "What's Missing?" version is my favorite. It's a very simple game. Players take turns by emptying the contents of the satchel onto the table. Inside are thirteen trinkets. One player closes their eyes while the other player removes a trinket from the table. Then the other player has to guess what's missing.

My students liked this game so much that I thought I would make some more of them. This is a great way to reuse all of those random game pieces, or any other little trinket that you find in the couch cushions, or under the seat of your car. I save these little items, and when I have collected thirteen of them I put them in an empty jewelry box and label it "What's Missing?"

The actual game that I purchased is called Think-ets and they have a nice little website with PDFs on all kinds of ways that this game can be used in the classroom. The game comes with a little instruction booklet for ten different games to play from sorting and guessing to story telling. There's an additional space intentionally left blank inside the little instruction booklet for you to make up your own game as well.

 3.  Story Cubes

This game is a favorite of my students. Like "Think-ets", there are many variations of play suggested with the game that spark ideas for other ways in which students can alter the game. The benefits range from story telling and language use to creativity and imagination.
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During the Global School Play Day there was a lot of laughter at this table, which attracted my attention. When I moved in closer, I observed a group of students excitedly listening to their classmates stories while waiting for their turn to roll cubes and tell a new story. I suggested a variation of their game that would require them to leave out a cube when telling the story to see if their friends could guess which cube had been omitted.

4.  Ready, Set ... PLAY!

I picked up this game in the exhibit hall at a Math conference for teachers. I was staying in the hotel at the conference site with some other teachers from my school and we were up past our teacher bedtime playing this addictive game. It is still one of my most favorite games.

When I first discovered this game, years and years ago, I made overhead projector colored copies of my cards so we could use them in class as a daily puzzle.  It makes for a great warm up, brain break, or finished early type of activity. Now there are daily digital sets online, a daily set app for your phone, and the New York Times publishes sets along with the Sudoku and crossword puzzles, all of which are much easier options than making colored copies on overhead transparencies. Just click on one of the links above if you want to try it out for yourself.

In addition to the original card version, there's now a dice version, a mini version, and a kid's version. 

5.  BeanBoozled! A Great Activity for a "Brain Break" 

I'm not really sure what the official rules are for this game. I think they come with the kit, but we have that kind of classroom where we make up our own rules. What we came up with is: I start by choosing two students randomly. I use the random feature on Class Dojo, but there are many methods for choosing students. Someone spins the spinner. I played a round with a student and it landed on buttered popcorn/rotten eggs. We each took the appropriate colored jellybean and popped them in our mouths. The idea is to trick the class, which is watching us very carefully for facial expressions, or any other clues to decide if we got a rotten egg or a buttered popcorn bean. I had rotten egg and failed miserably at keeping a straight face or offering a subtle clue that I had something tasty in my mouth to fool everyone. Two bites in and I'm shaking my head and saying nope as I make a beeline for the garbage can to spit it out. Yuck! The kids are much better at this game than I am.

There is another version similar to this, but with a "face-off" element to it, that another group of students came up with. Two students "face off" against each other and the student who is right gets to go again, choosing the next volunteer. If there is a tie, they keep going until there is a winner. This rarely happens, because it takes a fair amount of composure to act like something is strawberry deliciousness when it really tastes like centipedes-not that I would know what an actual centipede tastes like, but the Jelly Belly version is very gross.

Sometimes a student will opt out, and I really don't blame them. It is equally fun to observe with this game, and eating gross stuff isn't for everyone.

Some photos and Observations from our day of play:

The appeal of the marble maze is undeniable: everyone loves building marble mazes! I was able to observe a lot of problem solving while watching students play with this item.

Jenga is very popular and a great way to observe students going through the decision making process. We have a variation of this game that has questions written on the blocks that students answer as they pull them from the tower for added fun.

This student shared a strategy game that he created. The feedback that he received was very positive!

"Rattled!" is really similar to Boggle, but without the pieces to lose.

One of the games we played wasn't actually a game. I was talking to a table of girls about what they were playing and somehow we got off on a topic of "What's your middle name?" The student pictured above (center) has a hawaiian middle name that she thought we couldn't pronounce and she didn't really want to share, so we played telephone whispering her middle name in each others ears around the table, until the last student announced what she had heard and we all laughed-then learned how to pronounce it correctly. I had to share mine too, but mostly I enjoyed getting to know more about my students and the significance of their names through the conversation we had.

At the end of it all, it was a great day. I learned a lot about my students through observing their play-things I am not sure I would have seen during regular classroom work. I learned a lot about them on a personal level and our relationships were strengthened through shared play.

I put together some reflection questions in a Google form and plan to have them submit their reflections tomorrow. I am really looking forward to reading them and will share my reflection with them too (this blog post). The students in my media class are writing blog posts and news articles on the event and I plan to interview some of the students for our weekly video news broadcast, produced and directed by the talented Miss Capeluto- shout out to Miss Cap for the weekly dose of awesomeness!

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Play it Forward:  Games that Extend Beyond The Classroom

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: become a secret agent of joy, spreading art and intrigue to an unsuspecting public.
​-Sneaky Cards

One last game that I have to mention... if you love the experience of Global School Play Day and want to try out a game that never ends and can span an entire school year and beyond, check out Sneaky Cards and become play ninjas.

Sneaky Cards!

Get them on Amazon

Our class went on a field trip to the California Academy of Sciences and I brought sneaky cards with me. My students love getting chosen to complete a sneaky card mission and I gave one card to each group. Luckily, there was a community bulletin board at our destination and I was able to complete a mission of my own.

If you look closely at the card, you can see there is a tracking number at the bottom. If someone that finds the card follows the instructions and goes to www.sneakycards.com to register the card we can see locations on a map that show us how far our cards have traveled. Unfortunately we haven't had a lot of luck with our cards being registered.

So How Do We Make Play Happen More than Once a Year?

When I was an elementary school teacher games and play were a regular part of our day, not a special event that happens once a year. Some of that was lost in the transition to middle school. Global School Play Day and the reading of research that supports play, as I was preparing to have to justify our shenanigans, was a great reminder of the fact that play is an important part of learning. So how can we keep play going in the secondary classroom and use it as a way to make learning stick?

​Why not come up with variations of popular games that support curriculum? Or better yet, have students create these variations?

Headbandz is a fun guessing game that also makes for a great vocabulary review. It's a whole lot more fun than copying down definitions from the glossary, and more memorable too. My friend Lisa Guardino made a handy little instruction page for a classroom version of this game.

Guess Who? This game has a series of faces on plastic stands that flip up and down. Players take turns asking questions to deduce which person is on the other players card, flipping images down as characters are eliminated. 

This would be a great game to have students help create. They can create new cards to slip into the slots that are focused on characters from a book study or on Historical figures. What a great way to wrap up a Black History month unit? 

I did notice that the characters on the cards in this game were not diverse. This would be great opportunity to have a thoughtful discussion with your students. Ask your class, "Does this set of characters represent the diverse people in this room?". Can we make a version of this game that does represent us? Can you think of other games that you have seen that are lacking in representation of a diverse population?

Image Source: Amazon.com

It's all about the word play: Befudiom is like Pictionary, Taboo, and Charades all mashed into one game. Students roll an action die to see if they will act out, draw, or give verbal clues to an idiom. This one is a little difficult for my class because many of the idioms are unfamiliar to them-there were a few that even I didn't know. I still think it's a great game, but I might alter the cards and make my own for this one. If you make your own cards you could potentially include other types of figurative language too. This would be a fantastic game for your English Language Learners.

Have you got a favorite game recommendation? An idea for a content area spin on a popular game? Share it with me by posting a comment below.

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