Cup Speed Stacking

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What you need:

• 30 cups (ideally 15 each of 2 different colors although it really doesn’t matter) – I have used the red Dixie cups or paper cups from the dollar store.  You don’t want to use something like styrofoam because they are just too light.
• Optional but cool: exciting “game” music to play during the action.

Game:

Note: while this game doesn’t really teach a lesson it definitely CAN. You can teach on the story of the tower of Babel, on working together, on building trust, on how you need to carefully build your life or many other things. Let me know what you use it for so I can share it with others!

There are just sometimes when you need to play, have fun or even, “GASP” burn time in the classroom.  We have on occasion, had to run children’s services parallel to adult services that took over THREE AND A HALF HOURS and as you can imagine in that scenario, we had to be very creative to make sure that we didn’t let things devolve into chaos.

This game saved us on one such occasion.  It is great because while it is simple, it is also exciting AND addicting!  The kids like it so much that they will play it for a LONG time… on the occasion mentioned above, we played it for over an HOUR!

The concept is simple.  Call up 2 children to compete against each other, a good way to do this is boys against girls.  Give each child a stack of 15 cups.

The rules are as follows:

Each child must leave the cups stacked on the table until the emcee shouts, “GO” (if you have music, start it at this point).

The children must stack the cups in a pyramid, bottom row of 5, next row on top of that of 4, then 3, then 2 and finally one.  At the top, the child must make sure they are not touching any cups to make sure the pyramid is solid and then they take the pyramid down again.

The winner is the child that fully builds and then collapses their pyramid back into a single stack first, HOWEVER, I like to play it where if they knock any cups over two different times, that they immediately lose.  This makes them be much more careful than they are when you allow endless tumbles.

You can play winner stays on or have the next 2 competitors in line come up and play and you give a point to the winning side.  You can play for a set amount of time or to a point value.