Purchase or create your own matching games that reinforce specific content-area skills. To reinforce one-to-one correspondence, children can match a picture that illustrates an amount of items to the correct number. To promote phonemic awareness, children can match pictures of items to the letters or groups of letters that they begin or end with. To reinforce vocabulary words, students can match words to their definitions. These games can be played alone or small groups of students can play them together.
Choose games that are easy to play, can be played quietly and help to develop skills. Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Hi Ho! Cherry-O and Battleship are examples. Through these games, students build vocabulary and reading skills and learn how to play together cooperatively. What's more, basic skills, such as color recognition, number recognition and even basic geographical skills, are reinforced.
Set out several decks of basic cards that children can use to play Go Fish and War. Children can also use these cards to practice addition and multiplication skills -- to do so, they each draw two cards, add or multiply the numbers together and the person with the highest number keeps the cards; the winner is the person with the most cards. You could also include specific card games, such as Uno, Skip-Bo and Old Maid.
Get kids up and moving with bean bag games. Bean bag games help to build gross motor skills, hand-eye coordination and dexterity. Children can toss bean bags into specific targets, such as cups, bowls or empty trash cans; they can throw them into Hula-Hoops or toss them onto pieces of paper. Incorporate skills development by writing letters, numbers or vocabulary words on the targets; children have to identify what is written on the target that their bean bags land on.