Games in the Classroom

Here's a blog post that I wrote for Teaching Tolerance:

http://www.tolerance.org/blog/indoor-recess-time-unifying-games

As we get to the first week of school, I think about games a great deal. Games are a wonderful way to start the year. When games help us to build community and give kids a taste of what is to come in the classroom, they become powerful teaching tools. I like to choose about 5 each year that the class will play frequently. I change things up each year to keep things interesting!

Last year at around this time, I wrote about games that we'd be playing in the first week of school. Here's the link:

http://emilykissner.blogspot.com/2010/08/games-for-start-of-school.html

This lovely link from a school that uses the Responsive Classrooms techniques has more lists of great games, as well as greetings in different languages. 

...and still more games, this time from a blog post from 2009:

http://emilykissner.blogspot.com/2009/08/first-week-games.html

What other games do you love to play?