Recommended for upper elementary grades! Exciting indoor recreation and games
Ever find yourself unsure what to do for upper-elementary recreation time? Wouldn’t it be perfect to have activities that not only get kids moving but also build teamwork and social awareness? Here, we’ve gathered ideas that make full use of collaboration and brainpower—from a game where you stack cups by working together, to psychological battles that test your timing and when to jump in.
Everything can be done with familiar, easy-to-find materials and will get the whole class excited.
Have fun with your friends!
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Popular Ideas for Wordplay and Brain Games (11–20)
Finding the good points
As you play repeatedly, you’ll naturally start to find them! Here are some ideas for discovering good qualities.
When someone tells you your strengths, it feels incredibly uplifting, doesn’t it? Plus, when you share your friends’ good points, it makes them happy and feels great for you too! It’s a wonderful idea that boosts self-esteem, so I highly recommend it.
When writing down good qualities, it can help to specify things like how the person might be in the future or a specific episode that made you happy.
Feel free to adapt and incorporate these ideas in your own way.
Anything Basket
It’s a game where all participants sit on chairs in a circle and move seats according to given prompts.
There are fewer chairs than people, which heats up the competition to claim a seat and adds strategy to the game.
Choosing the right prompts is also key—if you put thought into them, you might uncover surprising details about the participants’ profiles.
It’s important to move carefully to avoid injuries during the scramble for chairs.
Counting how many times someone becomes “it” and giving a penalty to those with the highest count is also recommended.
Eiko Game
Do you know the Eiko Game? It’s an easy, indoor recreation you can enjoy anywhere.
It’s a simple game where you keep associating words to a rhythm based on a prompt—but it actually makes you think more than you’d expect.
It’s fun like shiritori, but since you need a sense of rhythm too, it can get a little nerve‑racking.
It’s perfect for when you get together with friends.
You can play with any number of people, so it works for small or large groups.
Even University of Tokyo students have taken on the challenge, so why not give it a try? It’s sure to be a hit!
Game of Hell
Prepare three boxes labeled “Who,” “Where,” and “What,” and put slips of paper with random words into each.
You draw from them in order to complete a sentence, but sometimes you end up with outrageous sentences.
Of course, you include the participants’ names in the “Who” box.
Then, the person who decides “this is the last draw” must actually carry out the action described by the sentence formed by the slip they draw.
It’s a hellish game where you don’t know who it will land on or what they’ll be made to do.
Funny Face Match
Don’t underestimate 100-yen shop games—these days there’s a wide variety, lots of fun ones, and they’re really popular.
Among them is the hit card game “Funny Face Match.” You lay out the orange cards, which show various expressions, where everyone can see them, and place the blue cards as a draw pile.
The dealer draws one blue card and holds it to their forehead so that everyone else can see it but they can’t.
Everyone then makes the funny face shown on that card.
The dealer watches and picks from the orange cards the face they think matches.
If the blue and orange card illustrations match, that’s correct: the dealer gets one card as a point, and another card is given as a point to the person who the dealer thinks best expressed the face.