Music games for the classroom: ten on the board, seventeen without it.

By the time you have

Three plans built from the games above. Each starts with listening, so the room is quiet before the first voice.

Setting up the board

Any laptop, tablet or phone with an up-to-date browser, connected to the projector or interactive whiteboard and to speakers. The microphone is the device’s own: one child stands about an arm’s length away and sings or plays. When the whole class sings into it at once, the page hears a crowd and can’t pick out one note, so the class sings together and one child sings for the page.

The browser asks for the microphone the first time a child taps; allow it once. It listens only during a round, a few seconds at a time. In a noisy room, the two listening games and Clap it back by tapping need no microphone at all.

For teachers

No game has a winner, a score table or a child who is out. A miss plays the round again; a child who would rather not sing alone sings with the class, claps, or passes, and nobody has to say why. The classics below keep nobody out; where one keeps score, it is the whole class against you or against a target.

The games keep nothing: what a child sings stays on the device and nothing is uploaded. A song made in Brumm Kids stays on that device too; if you want to send one home, ask the parents first when a child’s voice is in it (Privacy).

This page is new and hasn’t been through a real class with us yet. If you use it, write to hello@brumm.ai and tell us what the children did.

Classic music games for the classroom, with nobody out

These are the games music teachers pass on by name, in staff rooms and on teaching blogs. Many were written with a rule that sends a child to sit at the side, others with two teams racing for points. Both are easy to change. When Christopher Roberts asked second and fourth graders which singing games they liked (British Journal of Music Education, 2016), most chose the competitive ones, and the reason they gave was the running and racing, not the winning; the children who preferred the gentle games named the movement too. So every game below keeps the dash and the race, and a child who slips gets a job instead of a seat by the wall.

Rhythm games for the classroom

Poison Rhythm

Clap one four-beat pattern, write it on the board and call it poison. Then clap other patterns, and the class echoes each one. When you clap the poison pattern, the class keeps still. Play it class against teacher: a silent room scores the class a point, a single clap scores you one. Nobody sits down, and nobody blames a neighbour, because a point is lost together. To bring a chatty room back, clap the poison pattern three times without a word: the children who notice stop talking to listen, and the rest follow (Kristi Keast, NEA, 2017). Harder: two or three poison patterns at once, or a poison melody sung on so and mi.

Steal the Rhythm (Steal the Bacon)

Two lines face each other across the floor, the children in each line numbered from one, rhythm cards spread face up between them. You clap and say one rhythm three times, then call a number. The two children with that number look for the card; whoever finds it holds it up and claps it, the other claps it back, and the whole room claps it last. Keep no team score: the race is the game. Have them crab-walk to the cards rather than run, because paper on a hard floor slides.

Four Corners

Four rhythms on the board, one for each numbered corner of the room. While the music plays, children walk to any corner, and when it stops everyone has to be in one. You clap one of the four rhythms, or a child does with eyes closed, and that corner claps it back to the room before everyone moves on. The original sends that corner out; without it, the guess and the dash are still there. The quiet version practises piano: everyone moves without a sound, a child in the middle with eyes closed names the corner they heard, and that corner claps the next rhythm instead of sitting out. The same four corners work for anything with four answers: piano, forte, crescendo and diminuendo; strings, woodwind, brass and percussion; four styles from a recording.

Write the Room

Before class, tape ten rhythm cards around the walls, each with a small picture: a star, a fish, a bus. Every child gets a sheet with the same ten pictures and a line beside each, walks the room and copies each rhythm next to its picture, in any order. In kindergarten, draw the cards as long and short lines instead of notes. When the sheets are full, the class claps all ten in a row. It is a quiet game, and the only one here that leaves you a written record of who can read what.

Telephone Rhythms

The class sits in rows, all facing the front, and the first child in each row has a small packet of rhythm cards. You tap a rhythm on the shoulder of the last child in each row. Each child taps it on to the shoulder in front, without a sound. The front child finds the card and holds it up, then the whole room claps it. No row scores against another: every row that holds up the right card claps it to the others, and a row that got a different card claps that one, so the class hears where the rhythm changed on the way. Start with quarter notes and eighth notes; in 5th grade, add sixteenth notes and rests.

Rhythm Pizza: food words as rhythms

The way most children first make up their own rhythms. “Cheese” is one beat (a quarter note), “pizza” two even halves (two eighth notes), “pepperoni” four quick ones (four sixteenth notes); in the UK, a crotchet, two quavers and four semiquavers. Each child, or each table, puts four toppings in a row, say “pizza, cheese, pepperoni, cheese”, then claps and says their pizza, and the class claps it back. Write the words under the notes on the board, and after a few pizzas the children read the notes without the words.

Pass the Beat (Keep the Rhythm)

The class sits in a circle, each child’s right hand resting on their neighbour’s left palm. Everyone sings a song they know, and one child taps the hand beside them on the beat; the tap travels around the circle, one child per beat. NEA calls it Keep the Rhythm (Kristi Keast, 2017). In the usual version a child who misses steps out and the circle shrinks to one. Here the child who missed starts the next round, and the song only gets faster once the beat has made it all the way round. Vamos a Jugar is the counting-rhyme version: on “diez”, the hand the beat is about to land on tries to pull away in time.

The cup game

Each child has a plastic cup on the table or the floor. The routine is a loop of claps, taps and cup moves on a steady beat, the one the film Pitch Perfect (2012) made famous. Teach it in two halves, slowly and all together, before a song goes over it. Then the passing version: on the last move every child sets the cup down in front of the neighbour on the right, and the circle carries on with the new cup. It stays hard into middle school without anyone being out.

King of the Mountain

For grades 3 and up. Every child has a rhythm pattern on a card folded like a tent, so both they and the circle can read it. The child on the top seat says their own pattern in time, then, without a gap, someone else’s; that child says their own and calls on another, and so on until someone breaks the beat. In the original the child who slipped moves to the bottom seat and everyone below moves up one, while the cards stay where they are, so a move means a new pattern. Keep the moving and drop the throne: after every slip the whole circle moves one seat to the left, everyone reads a new card, and nobody is ranked.

Singing, listening and movement games

Doggy, Doggy, Where’s Your Bone?

A so-mi-la song for kindergarten to second grade, and a gentle way to hear children sing alone. The dog sits at the front with eyes closed and a beanbag bone behind them. You point at a child, who quietly takes the bone and hides it. The class sings “Doggy, doggy, where’s your bone? Somebody stole it from your home.” The dog sings “Who has my bone?”, the thief answers alone, “I have your bone,” and the dog gets three guesses by the voice. A child who doesn’t want to sing alone can steal the bone with a friend and sing it together.

Doña Araña

A Spanish-language song with a chase, for grades 2 to 5, when the older ones want to run (Victoria Boler, 2024). The class holds hands in a circle, the spider’s web, and sings while walking round. One child is the fly inside the web, one the spider outside. Before the song you secretly choose two children in the circle to be the door; at the end of the song they lift their joined arms. The fly escapes through the door to a safe spot before the spider tags it, and then both choose the next fly and spider. A tagged fly is not out: it only means the spider was quick, and the song starts again.

Walk and Stop (freeze dance, musical statues)

Drum or play music, and the class moves to it with the step you name: walk, tiptoe, hop, skip, giant steps. When the sound stops, everyone freezes. Nobody sits out for a wobble; the stop is where you change the step, and slow music means slow steps. With the youngest, drum it yourself, so you can stop in the middle of a bar and see who was listening. In the UK it is musical statues; NEA’s version (2017) sends a child who moves to sit down, and here the stop is where you change the step instead.

Guess the sound (the mystery bag)

Some call it Instrument Imposter. Six to eight sound makers behind a screen (an open book standing up will do): a triangle, a shaker, a drum, a bunch of keys, a zip, scrunched paper. Play one at a time out of sight. The class guesses, then sorts the sounds by what makes them: wood, metal, skin, rattling seeds, something from the kitchen. From second grade, play recordings of orchestra instruments instead and sort them into strings, woodwind, brass and percussion.

Music theory and note games

Music Trashketball

A Jeopardy-style board: columns for rhythms, note names, symbols or composers, rows worth 100 to 500. A right answer earns its points and a throw of a paper ball into the bin, from a line further back for more. Teachers usually split the class into teams. So that children don’t score against each other, play the whole class against a target set before the bell, say 3,000 points, or against you: the questions they pass on are yours.

Musical Tic-Tac-Toe

Class against teacher on a three-by-three grid on the board. A child names the note, rest or symbol you point to and puts the class’s X in a square of their choice; a wrong name or a pass gives you an O. It takes a minute to set up, works for any concept, and the class wins or loses together.

Heads Up, Seven Up

Seven children (fewer in a small class) each get a card with a music symbol, a note value or a note on the stave. Everyone else puts their head down. The seven tiptoe around, lay their card next to one child each and go back to the front. “Heads up, seven up.” Each child with a card first says what is on it, then guesses who left it; a right guess swaps places with that card-giver. It is one of the quietest games here and reviews anything that fits on a card.

Music Basket Turnover

Chairs in a circle, one fewer than children. Give each child a note or rest in turn: quarter note, eighth notes, half note, quarter rest (crotchet, quavers, minim and crotchet rest in the UK). The child in the middle calls one, everyone with that name swaps chairs, the caller grabs a seat too, and whoever is left standing calls next. Nobody is out, only in the middle for a turn. Call one or two names at a time and never everyone at once: with a big class, that is when children collide.

Which music games for which grade

The youngest on their own: Kindergarten music games. Rhythm on its own, from pulse to rests: Rhythm games for kids.

Free online music games for the classroom

The ten at the top are online music games in the sense teachers search for: free, in the browser, no account, nothing to install, one device on the projector for the whole class. They differ from most in one way: the class answers with voices, claps, hands and instruments in the room, and one child taps for everyone, instead of each child clicking. To give one game the whole screen, open its own page: Clap it back, Higher or lower?, Voice Rocket, What note am I singing?

Other free music sites that run from one projector without an account (checked October 2026):

• Chrome Music Lab (Google): Song Maker builds a melody on a grid and plays it straight away; Rhythm sets beats for little cartoon drummers to play; Kandinsky turns lines and circles a child draws into sound. From kindergarten.
• Blob Opera (Google Arts & Culture): four blobs sing in harmony while a child drags them higher or lower, so the class hears a chord change as one voice moves. From 2nd grade to middle school.
• Groove Pizza (NYU Music Experience Design Lab): a drum pattern as dots on a circle, so a beat becomes a shape the class can see and change. From 3rd grade.
• musictheory.net exercises: naming notes on the stave and keys on a keyboard, then intervals and key signatures. Upper elementary and middle school.
• Classics for Kids (Cincinnati Public Radio): games for note names, matching rhythms, musical terms and composing your own music.

Questions teachers ask

How do I stop a music game getting out of hand?

Agree on a stop signal before the first game (a raised hand, or a clap pattern the class answers) and use it once in the first minute, so it works when you need it. Start with a listening game, put the loud one in the middle, end quiet. Poison Rhythm is itself a way back to quiet.

What if a child won’t sing or play alone?

Let them pass, sing with a friend, clap instead, or be the child who taps the screen. Pushing a shy child to sing alone in front of the class costs more than one round is worth; most join in once they have heard others do it.

No instruments, or covering someone else’s class?

Twenty games with nothing but voices and hands: Music games without instruments. A lesson with every sentence to read out: Substitute music lesson.