Find Your Match works well with many types of subject matter, from math to history. Write paired items on individual note cards, such as division equations and their answers or famous historical pairings, such as Caesar Augustus and Rome or Elizabeth I and her head advisor, William Cecil. Ask the students to each draw a card and then find their match. When all of the students are paired up, have them explain why they belong together to prove that they have comprehended the material.
Give your students each three sentences pertaining to their current reading, two of which are true and one of which is not. Have each student read their sentences aloud and ask the rest of the children which sentence is untrue. When they identify the lie, ask them to explain how it could be made into a truth. For instance, if the lie is that Alice from the book "Alice in Wonderland" had a cat named Dixie, the students would say that Alice's cat was named Dinah to make the sentence true.
Jeopardy is a good game to play with large groups of students, as they can be broken up into teams to play. Pair a series of statements with appropriate point values, with the more difficult statements attached to larger point values. The object of the game is to ask each team to come up with the best question to satisfy the proposed statement. The higher point values also encourage students to take on harder questions to increase their chances of winning.
Assign each of your students a character from your current literature or a figure from the history that they have been studying. Ask them to read off a list of attributes pertaining to that character, and ask the rest of the class to guess who is there. For instance, if the reader was given Abraham Lincoln, he would say that he had once worked as a lawyer, held a position as an Illinois state legislator, went on to become president and led the country through the Civil War. The first student to guess who's there correctly takes the points.