BRAIN TEASER Grades 5-8 Bundle: 80 GAMES + 75 STORIES and PUZZLES

Item description

Save 25% off with this fun Middle School bundle, packed with games and mysteries!
80 ELA Games
Fun, educational games are crammed into the vibrant pages of this resource. There are games for individuals, team games, mini writing activities, silly speeches and mysteries to solve. The preview provides peeks into most of the sections. When even your most academic students are thinking more about the weekend or holiday ahead than about the finer points of your brilliant lesson, then bring on these educational games!

Here is a list of just the individual games. All games have an answer key! Most involve speed; the first person to finish is the winner.

Non-rude parts of the body that have three letters.

Words of 4 letters made from only those in ‘holiday’

Countries whose letters can be rearranged to make other words

Categories

Palindromes

Vowel-less words

9 words that can be made from ‘Washington’

The longest list of 11 letter words beginning with ‘e’

The longest list of sports
Matching author names to appropriate book titles

The longest word

Memory test

Anagrams of jobs and professions to solve

10 alternatives to ‘big’

25 alternatives to ‘said’

Top 10 lists, such as biggest countries in the world, the fastest animal in the world, most popular food and drinks, etc.

Literary terms bingo. It includes the bingo card for students, 54 questions on terms, and a 3 page definitions list to be given to students for review before the game commences. This is the only game which requires a few minutes of photocopying beforehand.

Brain Teaser Mini-Mysteries

Mini-mysteries are not only fun brain teasers, but also practice listening and inferential skills. They are carrots for the end of the day, or even bell ringers. Alternatively, early finishing or talented students could read the mysteries on their own. The most obvious methods of using these 15 tales are to read each one out loud or to show them on your screen. The students then guess the solutions. If you want them to work a bit harder, they could record and explain their guesses on the included worksheet, and write their own story, using the guidelines. The solutions are on a different page from the story and its question, so that students cannot see them accidentally; that would really spoil the fun! A few stories are ‘one offs,’ but some characters like riddlers Matt and Sophie, and Mr and Mrs Orange and their twins Pip and Peel, appear in more than one tale.

Included in the resource:

15 vividly illustrated mini mysteries.

An optional tips page, explaining the most common mystery/ riddle clue types.

An optional working page, so students can write down their guesses, and keep a tally of how many mysteries they got right.

A mini-mystery writing advice sheet, to guide students in writing one of their own.

A simple teacher rubric to mark the students’ own mini-mysteries.

I hope that your classes experience as much hilarity from these riddles and games as mine have done!

60 ELA Brain Teaser Mini-Mysteries & Puzzles
These 60 brain teaser tasks are perfect to have at the ready for instant fun and critical thinking. If your grades 5-8 students are getting restless and need a change of pace or brain break, or if an activity doesn’t take as long as you predict, bring out these cards! They will create smiles, while also stretching growing brains. It doesn’t get much better really, does it?

Uses for the brain teaser cards
They are ideal for morning work, or even as class closers. Individual students will enjoy challenging themselves, or they can be used in groups to boost classroom community. Early finishers will have lots of fun with them, but they are even more fun when used in small groups, with students taking it in turns to pose the questions. Alternatively, they can be used with whole classes, with the teacher or camp leader reading the cards aloud. Yet one more alternative is that they could be used at home, with parents and siblings. Two thirds of the cards contain a variety of short stories or riddles for students to puzzle over. The other cards mostly seek for similarities between words.

How to set up the activity

If you intend to get the students to ask each other the brain teasers, photocopy enough question and answer cards for the number of groups you wish to have.

You can leave the cards in sheets (6 to a page) or cut them into individual cards and double back the answers- whatever you prefer! Photocopy them onto card stock or laminate them and they will continue to delight many future classes.

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If you purchase this resource, it would be grand if you could review it afterwards. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about this product – or any other product in my store – please write to me at brilliantlylit@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you!