Indoor Recess: A Time for Unifying Games

On rainy, dreary days, an announcement breaks into my class around 11 a.m. “Please excuse the interruption. Recess will be held indoors today.”

From around the room, there are scattered cheers. My students are often happy to have indoor recess. I’m happy, too, because I see this as a positive time for my students to build friendships and interact.

It wasn’t always this way.

When I started teaching elementary school, my recess games cabinet was an assortment of ragtag board games. Some were bought at yard sales. Others were inherited from retired teachers. But they seemed to be the source of rainy day drama. Tensions from the Monopoly game spilled over into math. No one could agree on how to play Yahtzee. Cards and game materials were scattered haphazardly around the room.

But the worst part came as kids were playing the classic, “Guess Who?” In this game, players use the process of elimination to guess which card was chosen by their opponent. “Is it a nerd?” one kid asked the other.

“A nerd?” I asked.

“Yeah, the one that wears glasses, like a nerd,” the student answered.

I couldn’t believe that this simple game had become a way for students to communicate and reinforce stereotypes. Something had to change. Simply removing this game from our collection wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of our indoor recess options.

I wanted to build cooperation. I yearned to change the conversation.

But how?

One of my first (and still most popular) acquisitions was a marble run toy. Students work as a group to put together various plastic pieces to make a tall marble run. They try things out, troubleshoot and collaborate. Instead of being called over to mediate disputes, the students call me over to watch the action. “Mrs. Kissner, look at this!”

Cheered by this success, I experimented with other activities for indoor recess. When I put out a box of batteries, wires and bulbs, two enterprising students decided to try to teach everyone in the class how to make the bulb light up—and succeeded. A set of tiny plastic characters, complete with a kitchen set, became a way for a girl whose family was going through a divorce to act out how to manage multiple households. Small dry-erase boards became an improvised foreign language class led by a girl who grew up speaking Spanish. She used the boards to teach colors and numbers to a group of friends.

I still have that collection of board games in my cabinet. But those games are no longer the main focus of indoor recess. Instead, the room is filled with cooperation as students explore the materials and talk about their findings. Changing the activities that I have available for indoor recess has made a big difference in how students talk to each other—and in how we work together as a class.

Kissner is a fourth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania.