Education should be fun! And if you’re currently teaching 2nd or 3rd grade, there’s no better way to engage the whole class and help students learn than by playing a fun and educational game.
Interactive activities and popular board games can help young students develop different skills, including drawing and counting to motor skills, and hand-eye coordination.
Games and group activities can also help the kids’ social-emotional learning, helping them to become more confident and self-expressive at school and later in life.
So, with that said, we’ve put together 13 fun and educational games for 8-year-olds you can try in the classroom!
1. Bean Bag Toss
Bean bag toss may sound simple, but a fun game of bean bag toss will help the kids improve their hand-eye coordination and motor skills. You can also make the game more educational by adding quiz questions!
As an example, each time the children successfully catch the bean bag, give them a question to answer. If they answer correctly, they can throw the bean bag to another student.
2. Zentangles
Zentangles is an art style that can be a fun drawing game for kids. It involves filling blank shapes with lines, patterns, words, and more shapes, then coloring them in.
You can draw the shapes for them or give them stencils to create their own, which can be hearts, circles, stars, or anything they prefer! Zentangles will improve their drawing skills and encourage creativity.
3. Storytelling Games
Bring out your students’ inner writers with storytelling games that will help them come up with their own short stories.
You can create a storytelling game by providing the class with different storytelling prompts, such as printed cards with unique characters, settings, and incomplete sentences to stimulate their imagination.
4. Guess The Capital
Make geography more interesting for your class by turning it into a game. This educational activity can be done using a large globe or a large world map. Then, it’s simply a matter of asking them to name the capitals of different countries.
Organize the class into teams and count which team gets the most correct answers.
To help them out, you could also give them flashcards or a quick class quiz beforehand to test their memory skills.
5. UNO
UNO is great for helping children improve their math and memory skills.
This popular game involves various numbered and colored cards with addictive game rules that will have the kids counting and concentrating.
The aim of the game? The first player to get 500 points wins!
6. Marshmallow Toss
Marshmallow toss is a simple game that improves hand-eye coordination.
It involves throwing a marshmallow into a cup from a certain distance, but you can also organize this game in pairs so that a partner has to catch the marshmallow.
To make the game more educational, you can incorporate simple quiz questions that the children must get right to earn a marshmallow toss.
The more marshmallows they catch, the more marshmallows they get to eat!
7. Twister
Twister is a popular group game that’s fun for all ages. The rules are simple, too: each player places a hand or foot in one of the colored circles on the mat, depending on what color and body part is called out.
In addition to being heaps of fun, Twister will test the children’s balance and stability.
8. Monopoly Junior
Monopoly Junior is a child-friendly version of Monopoly. It involves a simpler currency and a smaller playing board.
There are many fun editions of Monopoly Junior and Monopoly (such as Monopoly Junior Super Mario and Monopoly Dinosaurs), which can also make playing this classic board game more engaging and fun.
9. Scrabble Junior
Scrabble is suitable for ages eight and over. But for an alternative version that’s slightly easier for the kids, Scrabble Junior offers a fun crossword-style puzzle that will help them improve their spelling, cognitive ability, and vocabulary.
10. Battleship
Battleship is a timeless game for all ages that’s great for developing logic, strategy, and memory. The kids are to get a thrill out of this game each time they successfully take out their opponent’s ships!
11. Snap
Snap is perfect for introducing the kids to the world of card games. It involves taking turns to flip cards over until two cards of the same rank appear, after which the first person to call “snap” receives the piles of cards.
Snap improves concentration and motor skills and can be played by two or more players. The player who does not run out of cards is the winner.
12. Stuck In The Mud
Dice offer an endless amount of games. But stuck in the mud is one the simplest, which involves taking turns to roll four dice.
All dice rolled numbers that are not five get totaled as points, so the goal is to avoid rolling a five! The first player to reach 50 points is the winner.
13. Frenetic
If you’re looking for a fun and educational science game, frenetic is similar to Scrabble, except it’s played with elements from the periodic table.
The goal is to use the element tiles to create as many words in a given time limit. The player who creates the most words wins.
Fun fact: there are over 10,000 words that can be made using each element of the periodic table. So this game is more fun than you might think!
Conclusion
And that’s it: 13 fun and educational games for 8-year-olds you can try in the classroom. These games will get the kids involved and engaged, making them just as fun as they are educational.
Try these games as a fun end-of-the-week activity or as something to do when it’s too wet to play outside.
Just don’t forget that these fun and educational games are also a great opportunity for you to build more rapport with your students, so make sure to join in!
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