Requirements
chairs, or other things to mark seats
Description
I guess this technically isn’t a circle game because you don’t sit in a circle, but same concept.
I’m not very good at explaining, but try to bear with me. It sounds complicated but its really not. The more kids the better! This game is soooo fun! We played it with about 70 middle-school kids and it was a riot.
Note- this game is sort of like Do You Love Your Neighbor.
Every kid needs a chair, or some other thing (shirt, beach towel, carpet square? etc.) to mark his place to sit on. Count up the number of kids you have. Pick one kid to start as the Bus Driver. Put his seat marker in the center of the room left/right-wise, and in the very front. Count up the number of kids you have left, and try to divide that into seven as best you can (one for each day of the week). Basically, you need seven rows (or bus seats), as even as possible. Have the kids form the rows behind the bus driver. They need to be far enough apart so that the kids can run between them without risking getting hurt. Ideally about 2 feet apart each. It doesn’t matter how many seats are in each row, as long as each row is about equal.
So organize them into rows, have them place their marker on the ground in their row, and sit down on it. It doesn’t really matter which row they are in to start with. Assign each row a day of the week – starting with Monday right behind the drivers seat, then Tuesday, etc. You can start with Sunday if you want, it doesn’t really matter, because you are not permanently labeling the ROWS themselves, you’re assigning each child a day of the week. Each kid gets his day and is that day for the duration of the game. For example, anybody who starts the game sitting in the third row is Wednesday for the rest of the game. The rows’ days change each round, but the kids stay the same.
Okay, time to start playing. As soon as everyone knows his day, the bus driver turns around and shouts loudly any day of the week. (Preferrably not Monday, because it doesn’t change anything.) What happens now, is that the very first row right behind the driver changes to that day of the week, and all the following rows change so that they follow the consecutive order of the first one. That probably made no sense reading it, so here’s an example. The driver shouts, THURSDAY! What happens is the first row becomes the Thursday row, the second row is Friday, then Saturday, Sunday, and on back, so the last row will be Wednesday. As soon as the driver shouts the day, the children have to get up and run to their new row, based on the day you assigned them at the beginning. This is tricky because they have to stop and count and figure out which row is now their row, but the goal is to get there ASAP, so they have to think fast!
The last child to sit down in his seat is eliminated. If you have a lot of kids and want the game to go fast, you can say that the last five kids to make it are eliminated, or the last 3, or something. In the end you’ll have two kids both racing to get to their row before the other. The last one left standing becomes the bus driver, and the game starts over. Kids can keep their original rows or you can assign new ones, but its easiest to just keep the original ones.
Hope that made sense, it’s a great game!
