musical colors

If you have a small class, here’s a quick and easy game you can play instead of musical chairs. It’s great if you don’t have chairs in your classroom or don’t want to go through the fuss of getting them out and putting them away.

I also use this sometimes when the class is a bit rowdy and I need the students to sit. Assign them a color and that’s their color for the rest of whatever activity you’re doing. (Works well for story time with an active class).

Cut six (or how ever many students you have in your classes) big circles of different colors laminated with large A3 laminate and tape them all together in a line.

It stores easily and can be pulled out for an quick and easy game of musical chairs (colors). Play some music, the students walk around the mat, and when you stop the music the students sit on any color. You can then ask the students (or have them ask each other) what color they’re sitting on.

Now, fold up one color, leaving 5. Play the music again. Repeat!

(Depending on how you fold it, you’ll get many color combinations so that you can use different colors each time if you want).

Some variations include placing vocabulary cards on the whiteboard with colors next to them and encourage the students to figure out which vocab card corresponds to the color they are sitting on. For students who are reading, you could write the colors next to the vocab cards, or write colors next to words:

i.e.

red – sunny
blue – cloudy
green – rainy
yellow – snowy
etc.

For younger children, its sometimes difficult for them to understand the concept of being “out” so you might want to just play the game without folding up colors and just play with the vocabulary or talk about colors.

You can also have the children who are “out” assist you in folding up colors, playing and stopping the music, or switching cards around on the whiteboard.

When it’s down to one color, I usually put some other object a few feet from the last color and the remaining two students have to walk around both. This avoids them stepping all over the last spot in attempt to be the winner.

It’s also very portable so if you’re out traveling to different schools, you can easily put it in your backpack and take it with you. If you have two or more, they make a great way to organize large classes into lines for relay race games. They also work well for team games. For example, if you had 20 students and 4 color mats, you could divide the class up into 4 teams and play musical chairs. When everyone sits down, you call out a color, and of the four students sitting on that color, the first one to call out the corresponding vocab/phrase, gets a point for the team.