Person bingo
Where: Indoors
Space needed: Enough for kids to walk around
Number of children: 7+ (These are the same for each game.)
Equipment: Pre-printed cards, pens / pencils for everyone
For this game you’ll need to prepare a set of bingo cards. Each card will be the same and have a number of boxes arranged in a grid eg 4x3 3x3, 3x2 (there should be fewer boxes than there are people in your group). In each box there will be a description and a space for someone to sign their name. The aim is for each person to go around the group, find someone who matches a description and then get them to write their name in that box. The winner is the first person to complete the grid by getting a different name in each box.
For a younger group I’d recommend keeping the descriptions really simple such as: has a pet, name begins with S, is in year one. For an older group you can use more challenging descriptions: can speak a language other than English, has more than two brothers or sisters, has broken a bone. It’s worth checking to make sure the grid can be completed by your group!
Team guess who
Where: Indoors
Space needed: Space for kids to stand
Number of children: 8+
Equipment: None!
Ever played the game Guess Who? Ever wanted to play in human form? Well now you can! Split the kids into two teams and get them standing in rows facing each other. Team A will need to choose one person on their team for Team B to guess and Team B will need to choose one person on their team for Team A to guess. They do this in a style similar to the Guess Who board game by asking a yes / no question about the person they’re trying to guess. So Team A comes up with a question to ask such as, ‘Do they have brown hair?’ If the person they’re trying to guess has brown hair then everyone in Team B without brown hair sits down and Team A gets to ask another question. If the answer is no, everyone in Team B with brown hair sits down and it’s Team B’s turn to guess. Team B then ask yes / no questions until the answer is no and so on. To win, a team needs to correctly guess who the chosen person in the other team is during their turn. You can guess who the chosen person is anytime during your turn but if you get it wrong control switches to the other team.
Line up!
Where: Indoors
Space needed: Space for kids to stand
Number of children: 8+
Equipment: None!
This game is super-quick and super-easy. Split your group into teams with four to eight children in each team. Give the teams a way to organise themselves and after you say go, the first team to be standing in the correct order wins. An easy one to start with is to arrange themselves in order of height. You can then make the challenges more difficult and ones in which they’ll have to find something out about the other members of the team. For example, youngest to oldest, who lives closest to your meeting space, who has the biggest feet, who has the most brothers or sisters and so on.
Hot potato
Where: Indoors
Space needed: Space to sit in a circle
Number of children: 6+
Equipment: Potato (or other object to pass), music player
As with pass the parcel, you need to sit the children in a circle and have someone to play music and stop it at a random time. But instead of passing a parcel while the music plays, you pass a potato (for safety reasons I recommend a cold rather than a hot one).
The aim is to pass it round and not be the person left with it when the music stops, but there’s more to it than that. At the start of each round suggest a subject, such as animal noises. The person with the potato has to make an animal noise before then they can pass it on to the next child. This child then has to make an animal noise, not one that’s already been done, before passing the potato on. Keep going and the person holding the potato when the music stops loses and gets a cross / card / some other way of keeping track. Play several rounds and the person with the least crosses / cards is the winner. You’ll need to think of some subjects beforehand such as animals, girls names, boys names, colours, foods. For older children you can make the categories slightly harder by being more specific such as pop groups, football players, films or ice cream flavours.
