Our last day of school was only four hours long. The highlight of the last day was our game show inspired by the tv show, Minute to Win It! If you are not familiar with the program, contestants have one minute to complete a deceptively simple task using household items. My firsties had never heard of the show before, so I got them pumped up about playing "the best game of all time" with my fake game show host voice and a series of YouTube clips.
The class split into five teams and nominated one person from each team to play each game after we watched the video clip of how it was done. Scroll down to see the game show video clips. I made a few modifications, of course.
Game one is called Movin' On Up. We used a stack of blue cups and one green cup. The objective is to inch the green cup upwards by moving the cups from the top of the stack to the bottom. I modified the game by using 20 cups instead of 40 and the kiddos were not required to use alternating hands.
Game two is called Elephant March. I put a baseball in the toe of a pair of panty hose. Each player puts the pantyhose on their head so that a leg of the hose hangs down like an elephant trunk. The player uses momentum to swing the truck back and forth to knock down water bottles, or in our case, plastic cups.
Ka-Broom is game three. You can see the blueprint for the gameshow version in the video clip. This is the game I modified the most. I sat paper plates on the edges of desks. Each plate had a large marshmallow on it. One team mate karate chopped the plate sending the marshmallow flying through the air. Another team member tried to catch the flying marshmallow in a cup.
Click the video clip to see games 1-3.
Game four is called Card Ninja. On the show, a contestant tries to fling a playing card and stick it in a watermelon. In the classroom, students threw cards one at a time trying to make one land in a bucket. This is way more difficult than it sounds!
The final game we played is called Apple Stack. The game is played just like it sounds. The kiddos thought this would be soooo easy, but only one little guy was able to stack four Red Delicious Apples in a tower. Tricky, tricky!
See the game show inspiration for our final two games in the clip below:
I overheard a child tell her team mates that the last day of school was the best day ever because it was so much fun! Melted my heart.
To play these same games like we did you will need:
Movin' On Up: 19 plastic cups of one color and one cup in a different color
Elephant Walk: one pair of pany hose, a baseball, six cups
Ka-broom: ten paper plates, ten large marshamllows, and a cup
Card Ninja: deck of cards and a bucket
Apple Stack: four or more Red Delicious Apples
a timer
Happy gaming!
