[Elementary School] Quick and Easy! Indoor Recreational Activities Perfect for Lower Grades
We’ve gathered a bunch of fun recreational activities that will make lower elementary school kids want to get moving! From active indoor games that offer plenty of exercise to brain-teasing games you can enjoy while thinking, these ideas are perfect for rainy days and cold seasons.
Kids can naturally deepen their communication skills by competing with friends or working together as a team.
Preparation is simple, and you can start right away—so make recess at school or time at home even more rewarding!
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Indoor Recreation Games with Brains, Words, and Logic (1–10)
Hiragana Collecting Game
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♬ Comical lively cute sports day – SOUND BANK
Let’s play with 50-sound (hiragana) cards! Here are some ideas for a hiragana-collecting game.
Once you’ve prepared cards or slips of paper with one hiragana character on each, you’re ready to go! Within a time limit, try to make as many words as you can that fit a given theme.
For example, if the theme is “animals,” you can combine characters to form words like い・ぬ (dog) or き・り・ん (giraffe).
It’s helpful to set aside space to place completed words, so it’s easy for kids to understand.
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.
Telephone game
Let’s play the game of Telephone, where you see if a message can be passed correctly all the way to the last person! Starting from the first person, pass the sentence along in whispers so that others can’t hear.
If the message reaches the last person without any mistakes, it’s a success.
It’s also fun and exciting if the last person acts out what they were told to reveal the correct answer!
Who am I?
“Who am I?” is a game where you personify an object and guess the correct answer from hints! For example, if the answer is “television,” you might give hints like “My face is square” or “My face changes depending on the time,” and the players figure it out from there.
You can answer questions as they come to give hints, or prepare a few hints in advance and have people guess from those.
It’s safer to decide the correct answer beforehand, but it’s also fun to spontaneously personify something in the room!
Indoor recreations that play with brains, words, and reasoning (11–20)
Hiragana Rearrangement Quiz
A quiz that kids love! This “Hiragana Rearrangement Quiz” challenges you to rearrange scrambled hiragana to find the correct word.
For example, if you have ちゆえうん, the answer is ゆうえんち (amusement park)! If you’re doing this at school, it’ll be even more fun if the answers are school-related words or tied to shared memories.
For lower-grade students, they might even be able to tackle words of around 10 characters.
There’s also a video compiling rearrangement quiz questions, so be sure to make use of it!
Hello goodbye game
It’s a game you can play sitting in a circle of chairs.
When you pass the ball to the person on your right, you say “Hello” as you hand it over.
Conversely, when you pass it to the person on your left, you say “Goodbye.” Since greetings naturally come out, it creates a friendly, relaxed atmosphere.
Funny Face Match
A card game called “Funny Face Match” sold at 100-yen shops.
The dealer draws a blue card and, without looking at it, holds it to their forehead.
Everyone else can see it, so they make a facial expression they think matches the card.
The dealer looks at those funny faces and chooses the card they think it is from the face-up orange cards on the table.
If they’re correct, they give the orange card to the person whose expression was closest to the card’s face, and the player with the most cards wins.
Competing is fun, of course, but it’s also a card game where just watching the funny faces is entertaining.