Parenting guide
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Indoor Activities for Grades 3–4
Here are some indoor recess games for kids in 3rd and 4th grade.
1. Paper Airplane Competitions
Let your budding pilots and engineers create paper airplanes out of scratch paper. Internet pages that illustrate different designs for paper airplanes, from simple models to sonic jets, are a great resource!
2. Hot and Cold
Have one student go into the hallway. Then, have the remaining students decide where to hide a small object like an eraser or a ball. When the student in the hallway comes back in, have that student move around the room looking for the object. The other students can say “hot” or “cold,” depending on how close or far they are from finding the objects. Encourage creative vocabulary use with words like “icy,” “freezing,” “smoking” and “burning.”
3. Silent Games
Keep a talkative class engaged and under control with a game like Silent Ball. Have your students stand in a circle and tell them that they must be perfectly silent on the count of three. Students must throw the ball back and forth to one another without dropping it, talking or laughing — anyone who does so is out!
To incorporate some learning, try Silence, a game in which kids must arrange themselves in a line without speaking. You can have your students arrange themselves alphabetically by their first names, chronologically by birthday, as the presidents in order or as fractions by size — anything goes! You can stick Post-It notes on them to help them with the organizing.
4. Strategy Games
Many kids in this age group are beginning to be interested in strategy games where they have to figure out how their opponents have arranged their hidden pegs without being able to see their opponents’ board.
