Whiteboard Games For Primary Teachers

There are times when every primary teacher veers away from the set curriculum.

Maybe it’s because you need a 15 minute filler because you finished your lesson plan more quickly than you thought you would.

Or maybe you’d like to reward your class for excellent behaviour and you’d like to do something more on the fun side.

In either case, a fun and easy to set up option (with little or no cost to you also being an important factor) is for you to use your school whiteboard to play a game with your students. Below are four great examples.

1.  Hangman.

This game is an excellent way to focus on spelling without the students even realising. Choose a student leader and ask them to write a word on a piece of paper. Check the spelling to make sure it’s correct.

Then, ask them to count the number of letters and then draw that number of dashes on the whiteboard. Students in the class can call out letters.

If correct, the student leader adds the letters to the word. If incorrect, they start to draw the hangman.

If the hangman is completely drawn (usually 10 elements) before all the letters in the word are correctly added, the student leader is the winner and can choose the new leader.

If a student guesses the word or guesses the final letter in the word, they become the new leader.

The classic version of Hangman is to choose one word. A more sophisticated version for older students is to guess a phrase or expression, a book or movie title, or a famous person.

2.  Jeopardy

To play Jeopardy requires a bit of preparation, but because the fun factor is so high, it’s well worth the time. This quiz game is based on the TV show of the same name.

Firstly, you need to choose 5 categories – for example, countries, food, music, animals and celebrities. You also need to prepare 5 questions for each category, preferably with varying degrees of difficulty.

If you don’t want to take the time to make your own list, it’s easy to find one on the internet.

To set up the game, divide the class into two teams.

You then need to divide the whiteboard into rows and columns like in the picture.

Students on opposing teams take turns choosing a category and a dollar amount.

Each student must have at least one turn.

When all of the category questions have been answered, the team with the highest dollar amount is the winner.

3.  Pictionary

You play Pictionary just like the board game. In fact, many primary teachers simply bring their Pictionary cards straight from their board game at home to use.

Split the class into two teams. Teams take turns choosing one representative to go to the front of the class and choose the top card from the pile of cards.

The representative is responsible for choosing one of the categories on the card and drawing the word from that category.

Their team has 30 seconds to guess what category word is being drawn. If they can guess within that time period, they get a point.

Once a category word has been guessed correctly, the team gets a point. The first team that can get a correct answer for each card category (5 points) is the winner.

4.  Words in a word game

Words in a word is an individual game. Before you start, make a list of long words with at least twelve letters. There are 20297 twelve letter words so you have plenty to choose from.

Write the first word on the whiteboard. Give your students 3 minutes to write as many different smaller words from that word as possible.

Students can only use letters from the whiteboard word and no others, and can’t use them more than once.

For example, if the word, was hippopotamus, students could write down a word with two Os, like shoot, but couldn’t write a word with two Ss like ships because hippopotamus has two Os but only has one S.

After 3 minutes, tell your students that time is up. The winner is the student with the highest number of correct words. Then start again and continue the game as long as time allows.

These 4 tried and true games that are easy to play on any school whiteboard are sure to bring smiles to young faces every time!

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