5 Whiteboard Activities for Kids

Having a virtual whiteboard makes lessons with kids a lot more fun and interactive. Today we'll show you five games you can play with kids using the whiteboard.

1. The Blind Drawing Game

In this game, you will have to draw something with your eyes closed, and let the student guess what it is using yes-no questions. The drawings will turn out pretty funny and, most of the time, hard to make out, so students will probably ask lots of questions (e.g. “Is it an animal?” “Is it big?”) in order to get the right answer.

If the student has trouble coming up with questions, you can give them hints in the chatbox (e.g. "Is it...?").

After a few rounds, ask the student if they also want to take turns drawing with their eyes closed!

2. Missing Words

You can use this game at the end of class to review vocabulary introduced earlier in the lesson.

For the game, you should choose a category of items (e.g. places) and ask the student to think of words belonging to that category.

Type the words on the whiteboard and ask the student to read them aloud a few times, so that they can remember them. To make it more fun, you can ask the student to:

• read out the words in different ways (i.e. fast, whispering, shouting)
• read out the words depending on their color (e.g. "Read the purple words! Now the red words!")

Ask the student to close their eyes while you remove one of the words. Then, have them guess which word is missing. Undo the “erase” action, and repeat the steps.

Another version of this game uses sentences instead of words. Write down a funny sentence or a tongue twister and have the student read it aloud a few times. Erase 1-2 words at a time, and then ask the student to say the whole sentence again. Repeat the steps until the whole sentence is removed.

3. The Disappearing Brush

This is another nice game to review vocabulary and practice asking questions. This time, you'll need to use the laser pointer tool.

Draw a picture with the laser pointer and have the student guess what you're drawing. Since the drawing will disappear, you can draw it again and again to give the students more chances to guess. Like the Blind Drawing Game, students can also ask yes/no questions for hints.

4. Word Find

Games like Word Shake are popular with kids. In Word Shake, players must make as many words as possible from the 16 letters in the box. However, if a letter appears once, they can use it only once in their word.

You can play a version of this game using the whiteboard. Simply type out four lines of four letters each. We recommend including E, S, T, R, and A, since these are the most common letters.

Ask the student to form as many words as they can with those letters. They can use the highlight tool to mark the letters as they spell them out. To make it more challenging, you can use a timer.

You can also switch and have the student write some letters that you can form words with. To make it even more fun, let the student choose how much time you get.

5. Guess the Word

First, choose a category (e.g. fruits, vegetables, wild animals, etc.) with the student. Then think of a word for the student to guess and draw blanks for the missing letters. For example, if you choose the word "hedgehog," draw eight blanks so that students can try and guess each letter.

For every letter they guess correctly, draw a part of the hedgehog. For every incorrect guess, you can remove a part or line from the drawing.

That’s it for now!

We hope this post has given you a few ideas on how to use the whiteboard with the little ones. Happy Tutoring!

This piece was written by Adela.