How Musical Games Can Elevate Classroom Engagement
September 28, 2023|
Ron Clark
The best way to keep young students engaged in class is to make learning fun. Musical games are a great tool for keeping students active and engaged, no matter what you’re teaching. In addition to being fun, learning through music can encourage advanced social skills, increase self-esteem, and boost confidence.
Let's explore some musical games that will boost student engagement at any age.
Musical Chairs
Musical chairs is a great game to promote listening skills in young children. You can play it normally, or add a fun twist to build reading and writing skills!
Have students write one line of a story or song on a sheet of paper. When the music starts, they will get up and move around the chairs, and sit down in a new seat when it stops. Wherever they end up sitting, they have to pick up writing where the previous student left off.
This is a surefire way to promote creativity. Bilingual studies can also utilize multiple languages during their songwriting, working on their reading and writing skills in more than one language.
In this writing-infused version of the game, there is no getting “out,” ensuring that everyone gets to practice their creativity and writing skills.
By the end of the game, each student will have a full story or song when they return to their original spot. They can either show it off by presenting to the class, congratulating each other on their accomplishment, and taking pride in something that they wrote themselves.
Make Your Own Instrument
This game can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. Though this may seem more like a craft at first, there is music to be made as well. Younger children can be encouraged to use simple household items like pots and pans to create sounds.
Older children can be a little more advanced with their craft-making. Depending on what materials you’d like to have the students use, they can choose from a multitude of items.
Some examples include using some cans covered with rubber to make homemade drums, making a simple-to-play harmonica out of straws cut to different lengths, a tambourine out of bells tied around a paper plate, or an easy xylophone with water in cups, where you can color the water for each different sound with some food coloring. You can even get really complex and make a guitar out of cardboard and rubber bands.
The game would be focused on who can play a song on their homemade instrument that kids can try to identify. Otherwise, you can have the students all collaborate together to play a song with all of their instruments as a unique class band!
Musical Scavenger Hunt
This is a game that you can create just by printing out a sheet of paper with a list of things to “find” around the room. With younger children, they can team up and search for specific musical objects.
The key to helping them learn is by utilizing music theory terms and creating objects that they can find to center around, such as a Treble Clef that might be on a piece of jewelry. This will take some planning ahead, as you will have to hide images of musical notes or physical musical instruments throughout the room.
The kids will have fun figuring out where each item is hidden as they search and are able to identify it. Since music can also help young children with language development, you can have them find the objects and say them out loud in more than one language in recognition.
The first student or team of students that can collect all of their objects, call them out (perhaps in more than one language), and return to “home base” will win! Turn on some background music and let the hunt begin.
For older children, you can add a twist to this game: you can have them not only look for music-related objects, but you can add questions into the hunt that they have to answer with a friend in order to encourage interaction with each other and learn about different types of music.
For example, they will have to find the hidden harmonica, but they’ll also have to find another student who shares the same favorite band or singer as them. This gets students talking and engaging with one another based on their similar music-related interests.
What Am I?
In this game, students will get a special musical card that they affix to their forehead. They cannot see what is on the card, and it can be as simple as either a musical note or an instrument, or for older students, maybe a specific singer or composer.
The students will have to go around to each other and ask only “yes” or “no” questions of each other and work to try and figure out what or who they are on the card. The first one who finds out who their card is wins!
Musical Matching
Musical matching is a fun way to engage students in learning musical terms, symbols, and theory. You can do this in a variety of different ways for students of all ages.
For younger children, matching pictures will likely be the easiest, so you can use pictures of music notes that are the same, music symbols, and other musical items like microphones, a person singing, etc. For older students, you can use words to match symbols, melodies, key signatures, key names, and so on.
If working on language skills with bilingual students, create words in other languages that match pictures and symbols, too. There are so many opportunities to be creative with this musical game to fit your classroom’s needs.
You can have your students work within teams to match each picture or word correctly, and whichever team has the most matches will win.
You can even add the addition of a bank where there is a special word for each match so that once all the matches are made, students can unscramble the words to read song lyrics and try to identify a song. This will utilize memorization skills for your students, which is another great benefit that stems from music.
Making learning fun is no easy task for any teacher. It is important to utilize resources and learn how to incorporate fun games within your classroom. These are just some ideas to help you get started. You can use your creative energy and imagination to create even more musical games that engage and inspire your students!
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