15 Best Indoor Classroom Activities

Everybody was freaking out! Daily tasks in the classroom can be very overwhelming that pupils need brain breaks. As they are held captive in your classroom for a long time, they need to relieve some stress and tensions by using the following best indoor classroom activities.

fun activities in the classroom

Games are an excellent way for students to break from the monotony of classroom learning while remaining deeply engaged. These fun activities in the classroom are basically classroom management tools that enhance student learning.

Here are the best indoor classroom activities or games that can keep pupils energized while boosting your effectiveness as a teacher as well.

Hang in there!

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Best Indoor Classroom Activities

Children love to play. That’s what they have in common. If someone in the classroom is having difficulty concentrating and performing, these activities might ignite pupils’ attention and keep them interested to learn.

1. Charades

When it comes to fun indoor activities, this game is quite a throwback but children and even adults still enjoy it today. This is almost present in every gathering.

In this fun game, students extend their imagination and use their critical thinking skills as well. It is the simplest way of making students think deeply about anything. Moreover, as the participants use gestures in portraying something they develop their non-verbal communication skills.

Charades can be used to help students grasp vocab words in a super fun way. Write these words or phrases on index cards and make sure that they are easy to act out.  Without using any words, a player will make gestures to project what the word is while the other teammate will tell what it is.

Basic Procedures:

Divide the class into two teams. Then, bring a player from team A to the front and expose one of the words or phrases to him or her in secret. Then, a time limit is set, let’s say 60 seconds. During the duration, the student will act out the words on the card while the other players from the same team will guess what the words are.

If they get the word correctly within 60 seconds, then they earn a point. Then, Team B will play and do the same thing. You can also modify the game by giving the opposing teams the opportunity to steal a point by correctly guessing the word after the time limit has expired.

Then, the team with the most points is the winner.

2. Freeze Dance

Dancing is everybody’s thing. When children are in the classroom, freeze dance rules! It simply rocks! To relieve tensions and stress, perhaps all you need is to dance it out.

Encourage the kids to stand up and dance. All you have to do is to put on some lively music and when it stops, the children freeze and remain motionless for a set time limit.  Any student who moves before the music resumes is out of the game.

Quite a simple activity yet so fun as you should encourage the students to give in their best moves. Furthermore, playing freeze dance is a fantastic way to get your students moving and energetic on a chilly winter day. It makes them expel energy in a matter of minutes.

Tell them to let loose and you will see how creative their moves are. The classroom will be filled with laughter and the tensions disappear so suddenly. The last student standing wins!

3. Message Relay

Children will surely enjoy this whispering game. It’s a fantastic way to develop better memory  as well as listening and speaking skills. Additionally, this is one of the great activities to develop effective communication in the classroom.

Evidently, when students communicate with one another effectively, they learn better and work together well. Message relay can be used as a warm-up activity for any lesson. It enables the students to relay a message perfectly when they have good listening and speaking skills.

Firstly, when the first player has a full grasp of the message he or she can relay it effectively. This is a good practice of good communication as it plays an important part in our life.

4. Human Knot

One of the ice breaker ideas I know. It’s super fun and exciting. Only that, you need to be very careful to avoid muscle pains and strains.

Being one of the get-to-know-you activities, it has been used in many classrooms everywhere. The physical closeness will illuminate new friendships at the beginning of classes.

How to do it? 

Players will form a circle and reach out to the hands of other players. To establish friendships, they introduce their names first and shake hands. As they connect, they form a human knot.

Then, the player will untwist the formed human knot without letting go of their hands. As they do it, they try to communicate with their new classmates and discuss strategies for unthreading the knot which essentially develops their problem-solving skills.

As well, this fun activity builds teamwork as the students work together to disentangle the human knot. They discuss ways of untying the human knot as quickly as possible.  It helps build trust and encourages critical thinking and persistence among the players.

5. Musical Chairs

Of course who can forget the ever-famous trip to Jerusalem? A fun game of alertness and wit!

To begin, arrange the chairs in a  circle. Its number should be one less than the number of participants. And when the music plays, they walk, march or even dance around the chairs which can make everyone laugh and excited.

When the music stops, participants should quickly take a seat. If a player fails to find a seat, they are out of the game and a chair is removed from the circle. Then, the cycle repeats until only one chair is left.

6. Hangman

Integrating lessons into games is made more meaningful with this fun activity. One of the effective ways of developing vocab, critical thinking, and creativity. Whether it’s academic or recreational in nature, the hangman always plays the best role for entertainment in the classroom.

The rules are straightforward. Consider a word or phrase and put an appropriate number of blanks on the board. Then, go around the classroom and allow each student to guess the missing letters in order to complete the word or phrase to make sense.

The hangman game is a good exercise for vocabulary building as well as spelling enrichment. As students take turns filling in the missing letters to form the mystery words or phrases, they develop their language skills. It’s a simple guessing game yet students can derive fun and learn from it.

7. The Floor Is Lava

An enthusiastic teacher like you should think about adding this kind of fun to your classroom.  But before you introduce this game to your students you have to be certain if you’d allow them to stand on their desks or chairs?. As for me, I won’t be allowing them to do so because I’m scared they might tip-off.

So I do simple modifications to the game. But it is still exciting. When I say the phrase “The floor is lava”, I expect my students to be seated properly and in attention, ready to answer a certain question for recitation.

The best thing is you can use your creativity here. You can set up the floor by making posters of islands where your students can step on when they hear the phrase, “the floor is lava” until they reach the finish line.  You can also create safe zones on the floor for students who really find it difficult to solve challenges.

The floor is a transformation of the lava classroom, allowing students to gain mastery of a specific skill as you can use this as a review activity or drill. In such a way, reviewing lessons for an upcoming examination won’t be that overwhelming. It makes the students spend a unique day in the classroom.

8. Simon Says

playing simon says

You’re sure to be a hit if you play Simon Says games in your classroom. This game is popular with children of all ages and having it in the classroom creates an energetic atmosphere.

It’s fun and great for listening. It’s so educational. That’s why you should try it in your classroom. To make it super fun, you can act as Simon and initiate action with your students.

All you have to do is modify the controls and rules according to the age of the kids to keep them active and dynamic in the classroom.

To make it more incredible, you have to plan out the commands and check their relevance to your lessons. Or if you’ll just be using it to break the ice, then you can have it on the spot!

9. Rock, Paper, Scissors

Rock, Paper, Scissors is one of the most well-known childhood games. Your students can play it wherever they want. It’s a brilliant move if you do it in your classroom!

It’s one of the simplest indoor activities I know. Yet, it’s amusing.  Turn it into a friendly competition and identify the champion.

First, you have to set up pairs to make this game work. You can create your own mechanics if there is an odd number. Just make sure that everyone is in pairs.

To identify the winner, it should be the one who doesn’t lose to any player from the beginning of the game. So, the last one standing is the ultimate champion.

To keep the kids excited from the start, you can announce that the winner will receive an award. A modest award can already make a difference.

For basic rules, check it here. 

10. Name That Tune

It’s fun seeing your students closing their eyes as they try to remember the title of the song, its singer, the style of music, and the origin.

One point is awarded to the first participant who correctly determines the origin country or other required details.  If students guess incorrectly, they are unable to guess for the rest of the song.

This is one way to applaud the music of the world. And this is not only for music content, but you can check its relevance to other subject matter to make it fit.

Moreover, music relieves stress, and incorporating it into your classroom activities is a great idea. Besides, this indoor activity is straightforward and fantastic as it is always enjoyable for everyone to listen to tunes and guess their titles. It’s more meaningful when kids sing along.

11. Countdown

Classroom countdown is an ideal word game that is played against the time. In this game, students take turns choosing a consonant or a vowel to generate nine random letters just like in TV game shows particularly the typical British Countdown TV program.

Then, the students will construct the longest words they can out of the characters. It can be a little challenging although students get along really well very frequently.  And you can set the time allotted to one minute instead of thirty seconds.

12. Skip Counting

Have you tried skip counting activities during indoor recess? It’s a fun way of loving math even more while having their breaks.

Such an easy way to develop multiplication skills. It’s less intimidating and it’s marvelous. You can begin having your young learners skip count by 2.

And since your creativity always comes into play, you just have to design engaging activities that can be used even while students are having their breaks. This can lead to solving real-math problems which are pretty important in real life.

As children learn to count fluently, they can be trained to skip count forwards and backward. The backward skip counting can be very challenging but it will be mastered when you do the drills every day. You can as well make the young learners count physical objects and have them write their skip counting facts.

13. Hot Potato

Here’s another active indoor activity in the classroom that will surely make children energetic and vigorous.

Hot potato is a timeless party game that is very entertaining and very easy to set up. Children love it and whoever participates in it will undoubtedly find it great.

You can pass around something that best represents the hot potato. Then, you can also play music while children are passing the imaginary hot potato with their bare hands.

Have the children sit in a circle while they pass around a ball, a bean bag, or anything while lively tunes play in the background. When the music stops, the one holding the ball is out of the game. And the cycle continues. Other than that, if the player drops the ball, he or she loses.

14. Rebus Puzzles

playing rebus

Technology integration makes teaching and learning more effective. Likewise, technology can make a great deal of fun in the classroom. Rebus is another fun indoor activity that can be done online or with a PowerPoint presentation.

This tricky game uses pictures to bring out words and phrases. Quite a challenging game and you must adapt this to the level of your learners.

Rebus also called the picture riddle requires intelligent analysis of the picture including the placement, the color, the design, the size, and so on. The game is composed of easy, average, and difficult rounds.

15. Bingo

“Bingo!”, exclaims the winner. Who doesn’t get excited about marking the last grid of the card and shouting Bingo?

If you want to make review sessions fun and exciting, playing Bingo with your students is a fantastic idea.  You can review lesson content like vocabulary, identification items, and mathematical concepts using bingo cards.

Bingo is a fantastic friendly match that is simple to learn and can be used to practice anything from linguistic knowledge to math and historical information. Everybody else, regardless of skill level, can play the game together. The students will just listen to the questions and mark the grid with the correct answer.

All players receive cards with the same words but in a different order. When you ask the question they look for the corresponding answer and they mark the appropriate square. The student who marks all squares in the winning pattern will yell ‘Bingo!’.

Conclusion

Through play in the classroom, children can develop social skills including collaboration, cooperation, and interaction.  Moreover, creative play is significant to student engagement and performance. It helps children how to get along with their classmates, prioritize their time, and select meaningful activities.

Evidently, the indoor classroom activities mentioned above can help you develop engaging lessons, build stronger bonds with your students, and support their academic success. Besides, you can modify the exercises according to the curriculum or students’ grade level.

Now, which do you think works best for your students?