Ep. 73: Five Easy Social Games for Preschool and Special Education Classrooms

Sometimes you just need five minutes, not a full lesson plan. In this episode, Audra and Caitlin share five simple social games you can pull out during transitions, brain breaks, or those in-between moments when it’s not time for intensive instruction but kids still need structure. These low-prep “pocket-size” games are designed for preschool, kindergarten, and special education classrooms and can be easily adapted for small groups or social skills instruction.

🔑 Key Takeaways
• Not every moment needs intensive teaching ⏱️—quick social games can reconnect and regulate learners.
• Keep games flexible 🧩—adjust group size, prompts, and structure based on your students.
• Emotions games build more than feelings vocabulary 😊—they support imitation, perspective-taking, and joint attention.
• Partner games encourage natural peer interaction 🤝—without over-prompting or pressure.
• Structured silliness matters 🎲—play with clear expectations supports engagement and cooperation.
• Filler time doesn’t have to feel chaotic 🔄—having go-to games reduces stress for students and staff.

📦 Resources Mentioned
• Simple Social Games ideas FREEBIE → https://abainschool.com/urve
• Related Episodes: How to Run Social Groups → https://abainschool.com/ep62
• Misfit Behaviorists Facebook Group → https://abainschool.com/misfits

🙌 Join Us & Share
• What are your go-to quick social games or brain breaks?
• Which of these would your students love most?
• Share your ideas or photos in the Misfit Behaviorists Facebook Group 📸
• Know a teacher or BCBA who needs easy social games? Send them this episode 💙

Join the Facebook group for collaboration and freebies: The Misfit Behaviorists

😍 More, you say? We’re here for you!

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👋 Find us!

• Audra | ABA in School
• Caitlin | Beltran’s Behavior Basics
• Sami | B.A.S.S.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Audra: And then with some of your more verbal or social learners, you can really talk about, why do you think they might be doing this. What do you think is gonna happen next? What do you remember happening next? What would you do if you were the third little pig? And do that perspective taking and prediction skills. And that makes it really fun. 

[00:00:16] Intro: Welcome to the Misfit Behaviorist Podcast. Join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Caitlin Beltran here to bring you evidence-based strategies with a student-centered focus. Let's get started.

[00:00:29] Audra: Welcome back to the Misfit Behaviorists. I thought today I would just share five really simple social games that I've used in different classrooms over the years. Really simple things, thinking about your preschool, kindergarten, young special education room. If you just need a quick break, a quick brain break, I call 'em like pocket-sized friendship games. They're just really quicky things. So super easy. What I find, and maybe you find this, Caitlin, is just sometimes, either at the end of the day or before heading out whatever, is some time where you need kind [00:01:00] of a break and everything's happening, you need a quick little, "Hey, let's just reconnect and have a little fun right now".

[00:01:05] Caitlin: We've been talking about this a lot where like it's not time for like intensive instruction, but it's not the time to go out to gym. So like that in between times where it's nice to have things like this up your sleeve so that you don't have to plan for every minute of the day, but you need to keep the kids engaged all the time.

[00:01:21] Audra: And if you run small groups or social groups in particular where you're pairing students together who needed just a quick social type activity, these are really good for that type of setting. I'll go through each of these and so the very first one I called Emotions Telephone. It's just a little circle group game where you use emotions in like a telephone. You remember the old game that we used to play when we were little like you tell a little secret to somebody and then they say it to somebody and then they say it to somebody and by the end the message is completely different. Well, you do this with emotions. So all you have to do is you can either get little emotions cards, so they're drawing an emotion picture, or you just whisper it into the one person you're gonna start with, [00:02:00] so they see or they get what the emotion is, and then they turn to the person next to them and they show the emotion. And then that person turns to the next person and they show that emotion all the way down to the last person. And then the last person either chooses which card they think that emotion came from, or just say what emotion they think it is. You know, say they picked a card of a happy face, a certain happy face, and so they pass it on down and by the end it looks bored or something. You know, it's just really funny. It's a very quick and easy game that you can do with anybody. And you can modify it and change it for whatever students you're working on.

[00:02:33] So some of the options that I've used you know Guess Who? It's a game everybody has. You can create your own little Guess Who game where you have different emotions. You keep it really simple for your young students in particular, maybe just have five emotions set up like that. And then they can each choose which emotion they think is being shown. So you could have like a little set up, five emotions, and then maybe the teacher shows the emotion and they guess which one it is. So that's one way that you could tweak it. Another thing we've [00:03:00] done is, you know the game Headbanz. You put an emotion card in there and then you have them try to show that and then they have to guess what the emotion is. Oh, I've done this where the teacher shows the emotions and then the kids, I had a bunch of the different cards out, so I would show the emotion and then everybody would vote together which one they thought I was making. And so that's a fun kind of group way that you can do it.

[00:03:26] And then there's emotions charades. Everybody knows that one where you have somebody stand up and you tell them an emotion. They have to act it out without being really expressive. So like if you say, "okay, do something that makes you happy," and so they're pretending to play tennis or something, whatever makes them happy. So that's another way you can do it.

[00:03:42] So that was game one. Game number two I called Partner Pair Up. And so I thought of this when I watched the kids playing buddy tag and stuff where they run around and they're safe when they're right next to somebody and when they run away they're not. And so I tweaked it around. So in this case, you have to have kind of enough students to pair this [00:04:00] up. But so either the teacher whispers something or use a kind of a set of cards with ideas and with a really super prompt to one person. So you might whisper something like "find somebody who likes pizza," "find somebody who looks happy" and then they have to run around and try to find somebody that fits that thing and then they stand next to that person, that's their partner. You can do this if you have a group of like eight kids or something like that, you can have three, and you quietly tell each of them one thing that they're trying to find and then they have to go and find somebody, and the three of them can be out doing that at the same time and they pair up. Then if there are any kids who didn't get paired up at the end, you can ask the final ones. Okay, "now go find somebody that likes the same thing as you". You can make it like open-ended or something, so you're kind of buddying up, partnering up. Just a fun little activity in kind of a buddy tag. So you can do things like, find somebody who likes pizza, find somebody who has a blue shirt, somebody who looks happy, somebody who likes soccer, and then you're bringing in that social questions [00:05:00] into the game as well.

[00:05:01] Caitlin: Now, how many people would you play this game with?

[00:05:03] Audra: I've done this as small as four and as much as 10. I wouldn't do anything more than that. It gets too chaotic. With all of these games, you really have to think about the learners that you have in that group. So some kids are gonna be too overwhelmed or they're not gonna be able to understand the questions in that kind of big setting and stuff. So really think about your learners. You can always make it more difficult and less difficult according to your kiddos too. And there's some other options that we've done with this is like doing just open-ended questions. So like I said, find somebody who likes the same sport as you. There's been times where we've tried to do it as a race, so I'd have several kids at once. "Okay. You guys find somebody who does something", an open-ended thing, and then the first one to find a buddy is the winner. You have to be really careful with the winners and the racing, but certain groups you can do that with and that makes it extra fun. Another tweak that we've done is we find opposite pairs. So you might say, " do you like soccer? Go find somebody who doesn't like soccer" so kind of [00:06:00] tweaking that kind of negative of whatever the prompt is. So that would be activity number two.

[00:06:06] And then the third one is a silly partner play. So again, you can either just create your own out of your head, you can have a little deck with already prompts or you can think of your own and you're just gonna do little play prompts with a silly twist. So something like you're gonna put two or three kids in a group, little groupings, take your shoes and socks off and play and roll the ball with your feet. Or maybe the next card is build a block tower with your eyes closed. Or get two puzzles but only put pieces in with your friend, only into your friend's puzzle. So just little silly tweaks. And then, they draw the card and they get in their little groups, they draw a card, or you just tell them what they're gonna do with kind of a silly twist. It just makes that open-ended, you know, you have like 10 minutes before recess starts, but we're kind of done with our tasks. Let's just do something, hey, let's do silly partner play for a few minutes.

[00:06:56] Structured play. I love that.

[00:06:58] And then number [00:07:00] four is what I call story freeze. And in this case, I would have either a teacher or a student, I had some really good readers when they were little, which was fun. So read a common story like the three Little Pigs or Give a Mouse a Cookie or something that's really well known and easy to read. And then another teacher or student can randomly say, freeze. And then they stop the story in that moment and the students act out what's happening. This is really fun, 'cause then you start getting, and this again, you have to have students who really can participate in this. But you know, starting to talk about perspective taking and problem solving and why do you think they're doing this? And flexible thinking. Flexible thinking in particular where you're stopping a story they really like that could be really hard for some of our learners. You could also use real classroom scenarios or short social scenarios. You can write up very short social paragraph, something happening, and then pause it and have them act it out. And then with some of your more verbal or social learners, you can really talk about, why do you think they might be [00:08:00] doing this. What do you think is gonna happen next? What do you remember happening next? What would you do if you were the third little pig? And do that perspective taking and prediction skills. And that makes it really fun.

[00:08:11] I have a bunch of books that I call 'em the social sleuth books, where I took a really simple social scenario, a social story, and each story is in kind of a choose your own adventure format, and this is really, really young, but this, these are really good books that I've used to do this. Because the story goes along and our little character has to make a decision when they come up to a real quick, you know, like, somebody took your book, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna do this or this? So those are really good ones that I've been able to do where we stop the story right there. What would you do? Would you do this choice? Would you do that choice? Which is kind of an unexpected behavior, which would make you feel good? You know, those type of things. So kind of story freeze.

[00:08:48] Caitlin: I love that one 'cause you could differentiate it on so many levels. Like I'm thinking some students could just open-ended answer or act out what would you do next? And other learners it's like, how would you feel this way or that way? And you're [00:09:00] giving like really structured choices.

[00:09:01] Audra: Yes, I love it. Really fun. Okay, so the last one, activity five, I call Desk Ball. And you could probably come up with a cleverer name than that, but this is one I probably played the most and usually with my older, later elementary, maybe middle school, I mean, you can modify it. Dude, you can modify anything to do anything with any student. But anyway, what we did was we'd have, you know, say we had five or 10 minutes left before the buses came or something like we need just a filler. And so everybody sits on their desk. You have to make sure you have students who can do this safely. But everybody sit on their desk and then we use like either squishy or really softball to toss around the room. Different ways that we would do this either we would call out a category and so, "okay, we're gonna do sports", and then they would toss the ball to somebody and everybody would say a sport "baseball" and then toss it "soccer". How many could we get through before we run out? And then we do another, "okay, let's do favorite foods", and then we toss the ball. How many can we can go in before it gets dropped or something like that? Then we've done it with social questions, we [00:10:00] would toss it and then they'd have to answer a question like, " what do you do when you feel mad?" " What's your favorite game to play with a friend at recess?" Make 'em social questions too.

[00:10:08] Caitlin: I like that one a lot, and I thought you were gonna say it first, i've done the one where it's like the big beach ball and you write the questions on the ball and then where you answer it, you look and like, "oh, my thumb landed on what do you do when you're happy?" Or, and then you throw in it,

[00:10:22] Audra: oh, I like that

[00:10:23] Caitlin: they read whatever kind of one landed on their end. But same idea.

[00:10:28] Audra: Yep. You can get creative with any of these. I've done it before with this where older students may be able to handle like an elimination side where we would toss it and we had this one room, I'm thinking it was kind of a big room, and so some of the students were quite spaced out and if they tossed it too far and the student couldn't hit it, well, they had to sit down. And it really depends on the learners that you have, if you can do this, but we would do it like you'd sit down if you missed it, or if you tossed it really poorly, you'd have to sit down. And then the last one, in order to make it not a negative thing, the last person got to choose the reward for everybody in the [00:11:00] class. And so there was no, with this particular group, it was totally fine and they thought it was hilarious when we get down that person, okay, everybody gets five m and ms or something like that. But that person gets to choose what the reward is for everybody.

[00:11:11] And so these were just quick brain bender fillers if you have a few minutes in class, and want something new to do, I will put together some ideas to give you ideas of what to do. I'll put that in the show notes and you can download those anytime. And hey, pop onto the Facebook group if you have other ideas, quick fillers. We're always looking for cute ideas like that. I love the beach ball idea. Anything you have like that 'cause we need those " help me get through the next two minutes,"

[00:11:37] Caitlin: all the downtimes.

[00:11:38] Audra: Alright, and we'll talk to you guys again next week.

[00:11:40] Thanks for listening to the Misfit Behaviorists. And be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.