ELA CLASSROOM COMMUNITY BUILDING - ELA Fun Grades 5 6 7 8

This ELA fun bundle is designed to build a happy, collaborative classroom community. Create a supportive, positive classroom environment with these team activities! A class that laughs together and solves brain teasers together will learn together more effectively. Save 30% on this no-prep bundle of joy! A freebie and a bonus file are included for yet more chuckles AND collaboration.

ELA GAMES
80 fun, educational ELA games and activities are crammed into the vibrant pages of this Middle School resource. Your Classroom Community will be enriched and class spirit will thrive! There are games for individuals, team games, mini writing activities, silly speeches and riddles to solve. The preview provides peeks into most of the sections.

All games have an answer key! Many involve speed; the first person, duo or team to finish is the winner. Here are just a sampling of some of the 80 games.

Non-rude parts of the body that have three letters.

Words of 4 letters out of the word ‘holiday’

Names of countries that can be made into other words

Categories

Palindromes

Vowel-less words

9 words that can be made from Washington

The longest list of 11 letter words that begin with ‘e’.

The longest list of sports

Book titles and matching humorous author names

The longest word

Memory test

Anagrams of jobs and professions

10 alternatives to ‘big’

25 alternatives to ‘said’

Top 10 lists, such as biggest countries in the world, the fastest animal in the world, most popular food and drinks, etc.

Happiness Activities
These fun activities are designed to raise students’ spirits! All of the activities, from jokes, to riddles, to writing on happy events past, present and future, will put a smile on students’ faces. They will write a dice roll story that ends happily, pen a limerick, and send a greeting card to someone special. All of the vocabulary activities - the word search, the word cloud, the word scramble - focus on feel-good words. This no-prep package is designed to be completed without adult assistance and so is ideal not only for the classroom, but also for homework, early finishers, and sub plans. Answers are supplied for the jokes mix and match pages (questions are separated from the jokes' punchlines), the word search and the word scramble. A simple rubric is supplied should you wish to use this resource for marks. This Happiness Activities packet has been especially formatted to make it easy for independent learning and homework. The answers are in a separate document in the zip file. This means that you can post the activities resource to a password protected homework site, such as Google Classroom, and then post the answers several days later, so that students can check their answers themselves.

Table of contents

Jokes (mix and match) #1

Limericks

Riddles

Greetings card

Dice roll story

Word search

Past happiness

Present happiness

Future happiness

Word cloud

What happiness looks like

Word scramble

Jokes #2

60 ELA Brain Teasers Vol #2
These 60 brain teaser tasks are perfect to have at the ready for instant fun and critical thinking. If your grades 5-8 students are getting restless and need a change of pace or brain break, or if an activity doesn’t take as long as you predict, bring out these cards! They will create smiles, while also stretching growing brains. It doesn’t get much better really, does it?
Uses for the brain teaser cards
They are ideal for morning work, or even as class closers. Individual students will enjoy challenging themselves, or they can be used in groups to boost classroom community. Early finishers will have lots of fun with them, but they are even more fun when used in small groups, with students taking it in turns to pose the questions. Alternatively, they can be used with whole classes, with the teacher or camp leader reading the cards aloud. Yet one more alternative is that they could be used at home, with parents and siblings. Two thirds of the cards contain a variety of short stories or riddles for students to puzzle over. The other cards mostly seek for similarities between words.

How to set up the activity

If you intend to get the students to ask each other the brain teasers, photocopy enough question and answer cards for the number of groups you wish to have.

You can leave the cards in sheets (6 to a page) or cut them into individual cards and double back the answers- whatever you prefer! Photocopy them onto card stock or laminate them and they will continue to delight many future classes.

Brain Teaser Riddles Team Activity

This grades 5-8 brain teaser riddles activity is a chuckle-a-minute team game that uses the rules of charades, but is a hilarious mixture of acting and drawing. Some students will pick a card that tells them to act out the answer of their riddle to their team. Some will pick a card that tells them to draw the answer. Some lucky students will select a card that allows them to choose whether to act or draw!

This is how it works

1. A student goes to the front of the room and takes a card from the top of the face-down stack on a desk. They read out the riddle on their card. They can repeat it ONCE if asked.

2. They act or draw the answer, depending on what the card instructs them to do. They have 30 seconds. Sounds can be made, but neither actors nor artists can use words.

3. The other students in their team have 3 tries to guess the answer.

4. If the team doesn’t get it right, then it goes over to the other team who has one guess. The other team can only take 15 seconds.

5. If any of the team members get the right answer, the team does a high-5.

SET UP

Cut up the 30 cards or ask a keen student to do so. If you can laminate them, they will last for dozens of fun classes.

START UP

Divide the class into two teams facing each other. Shuffle the cards and put them face down on a desk at the front of the room. Select a confident student to go first.

DIFFERENTIATION

If you have several struggling students in your class you can change the usual charades rules for the class and give all the students their card in advance so they can plan how they are going to act or draw the answer. Students need to be cautioned not to show their card or talk about it. If you have a class that does not work well under pressure, you could increase the performance time to one minute so that guessing the riddles solution becomes a more leisurely process.

More Brilliantly Lit happiness:
For a daily brainteaser to add zing! to the start of each class: BRAINTEASER BELL RINGERS: MYSTERY STORIES, RIDDLES AND PUZZLES FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL
For fun comprehension and reading tasks: Brain teaser mystery fun inferential skills practice

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about this product - or any other product in my store - please write to me at brilliantlylit@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you!

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