Classroom Games for 2nd & 3rd Graders on the Topic of Communities & Neighborhoods

Community Charades

Second- and third-grade students must learn about community services and helpers. Charades is an ideal game for allowing the kids to learn about different jobs in the community. On index cards, write different careers one might see in a typical community, such as baker, brick layer, business person, chemist, disc jockey, farmer, mail carrier, nurse, plumber, surgeon, and so on. Have the children each pick a card from a hat or use some other blind method of distributing them to the class.

One by one, the students will stand in front of the class and act out the job listed on their index cards. The other students must guess which community helper the student is acting out.

This game can accompany a lesson about Labor Day. Compile the different community helpers for a spelling list. It might also be a good opportunity to discuss future job options or invite different community helpers to the classroom to speak to the students.

Teach the students about country living versus city life, using Aesop's fable,"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse." You may also introduce other cultures at this time by reading similar tales from other countries, including France, Romania and Norway. After students have gained a complete understanding of the differences in urban and rural life, you can play a word game using either a letter die or a letter spinner.

Ask students to take out a sheet of paper and fold it in half vertically. On top of the left side, they should write "Urban." Instruct them to write "Rural" on top of the other half. Then randomly select a letter using either the die or spinner. Students must list as many things as they can that begin with that letter that they could find in each community type. Lists cannot contain items that they could find in both, such as "people" or "clouds." For instance, for the letter S, students might write "skyscraper" under "Urban" and "sheep" under "Rural."

Take three students aside and quietly assign them random roles within the community, such as a painter, a construction worker, and a policeman. Ask a fourth student to join the other three in front of the classroom. Tell the students that the fourth student is new in the neighborhood. She is meeting the others in the community for the first time at a social gathering. She must mingle with the others, asking "yes" or "no" questions to determine what their job is. She can ask questions like: "Do you wear a uniform?" or "Do you work with your hands?"

You may choose to break the class up into groups of four so that everyone is playing at once. You can also allow the student doing the questioning to ask for help from her classmates, even tagging another student to switch with her.

After studying communities and customs in different countries, you can hold a "Dating Game"-style activity. Assign each student a different country, culture, race, or religion. For instance, you can have an Australian, a Hindu, and someone from the Himba tribe of Africa. The students may not tell others which culture they represent.

Ask three students to sit at the front of the classroom. Call on their classmates to ask them questions. The questions should be indirect, such as, "If you went out to a restaurant, what would you eat?" The participants must take on the characteristics of their assigned culture and answer questions as someone from that culture would. The Australian might say that he wanted shrimp on the barbie. The Hindu would reply that he would not eat the beef. The member of the Himba tribe might respond that she'd prefer to follow the herd to the next watering hole.

The first three students to guess which cultures the participants represent will be the next to play the game and take on the characteristics of their assigned culture. The game continues until everyone has had a chance.