Games That Teach Young Kids to Stop, Listen, and Focus

In a classroom of five and six-year-olds, things sometimes bubble up and boil over: An exuberant child may blurt out an answer, stand up and run around the classroom, or pry away another student’s toy without considering the consequences. 

But for happy outcomes in school, children must eventually learn to behave and focus. One hallmark of this kind of self-control is “response inhibition”—a critical skill that researchers define as “the ability to intentionally override or modulate a motor response irrelevant to a task at hand.” Rather than blurting out the answer, kids who practice response inhibition may learn to pause, collect their thoughts, raise their hand, and wait to be called on.

In a 2024 research review, developmental psychologist Elena Savina concluded that games that require children to stop and then execute other tasks—like Simon Says or Red Light, Green Light—can exercise and improve kids’ self-regulation by targeting the neurocognitive processes at work behind it. 

What’s Behind the Cognitive Curtain?

Behind self-regulating acts, like working on an academic task while temporarily restraining the urge to play, sing, or talk with a friend, are a gamut of neurocognitive processes.

Response inhibition allows students to stop during a pleasurable experience, freeing up cognitive space to attend to new tasks or instructions that may be less immediately rewarding. In a stop-and-go game with complex rules, this self-regulation circuit is repeatedly activated: Children must execute a set of motor tasks, for example, when a game leader precedes a command with “Simon Says,” and remain motionless if the command is given without that precursor. According to the researchers, such games may be a kind of self-regulation workout, spurring children to inhibit a desired behavior, attend to relatively complicated instructions, and then summon the executive functions that allow them to focus on completing the sequence of steps.

These games are unique, the researchers say, because they explicitly require students to inhibit their bodies from moving. The activities stimulate the “cerebellum, motor, and pre-motor areas of the brain, while activating the frontal lobe”––the center for higher-level cognitive control.”

In academic settings, these newly learned behaviors may translate into the ability to follow instructions and focus on a language or math lesson, rather than eyeing toys peeking out of their bins or friends talking nearby.

Simon Says

Preschool teacher Sarah Dolcin plays Simon Says to help her students transition from tasks and practice self-control. In the popular game, kids must resist the urge to perform an action when the verbal command isn’t preceded by ‘Simon says’. If those two words are uttered, the child must then perform the specific action that follows. For example, if the teacher says, “Simon says spin,” the child must spin, but if the teacher only says “spin,” the child must not move. 

In a 2015 study, 8- to 12-year-olds played a version of Simon Says called Wesley Says for 20 minutes every day over the course of a week. Researchers measured the rate at which kids made mistakes, by incorrectly performing the action when the game leader didn’t say “Wesley Says,” or failing to react when the proper cue was given.

Seven days of playing Wesley Says significantly reduced the kinds of errors students made during game play, and “significantly improved the children’s response inhibition ability,” said the researchers, improvements which “may reflect a combination of both enhanced attention and reduced impulsivity.”

Red Light, Green Light

In Red Light, Green Light, a teacher stands at the opposite end of the room from the children and acts as a stoplight. The teacher holds up a red piece of paper to signify “stop” and a green one to mean “go”. Children either walk towards the teacher on “go” or freeze in place at “stop,” practicing response inhibition as they “inhibit their motor behavior when seeing a red light and initiate it when seeing a green light,” explain the researchers in the 2024 review. 

In a 2011 study covered by the researchers, preschoolers played a version of Red Light, Green Light along with other start-and-stop games twice a week for eight weeks. For each game, the researchers gradually added more complex or surprising rules: In their rendition of Red Light, Green Light, they switched the cues to purple and orange paper, and then changed what each color symbolized–purple meant “stop” in one game, and “go” in the next. 

Educators may want to add fun new steps like these to games as a way to improve working memory and push students to attend to, and actively process, more information. In addition to promoting better motor and impulse control, “games with rules also place demands on working memory, the mental place where children hold game rules,” the researchers say.

A Makeshift Symphony

In the same 2011 study, a stop-and-start musical activity yielded similar benefits. Teachers used a makeshift "conducting baton" as children played instruments like bells and maracas. The rules required that students play their instruments at a tempo consistent with the teacher’s hand motions, and then abruptly stop when the teacher put the baton down.

As in the Red Light, Green Light game, the researchers sometimes changed the meanings of the cues: In some versions of the game, for example, children stopped playing when the teacher waved the baton, and started when the baton was set down. 

By flipping the instructions, educators require students to adapt their responses to the new task, prompting them to pay very close attention and select the relevant and appropriate course of action. To play the game successfully “and follow through with continually changing multistep instructions,” the researchers explain, “attention and working memory were essential.” 

Moving to the Beat

Other educators played drums and directed children to clap, stomp, walk, or dance only when the drum was playing.

To make the game more challenging, children synchronized their pace to changing tempos, and responded to increasingly complex cues—game dynamics that are meant to promote academically important skills like attention and the prioritization of relevant information.

Dance Freeze

In this simple game, teachers play recorded songs over a device like an iPad and children dance to the tempo–fast when the pace of the music increases, slow when it downshifts. The trick: When the music stops, students must freeze and remain motionless. 

In one version of the game, students must stop when the music stops, and then quickly scurry to a piece of construction paper on the floor that matches the color the teacher holds up, requiring students to stop and think about their next move.

Founder and Executive Director of Child’s Play, NY, Jocelyn Green, plays a variation of this game, called Feelings Freeze Dance, in which the teacher calls out a feeling that kids act out during the freeze. “The simple act of stopping mid-motion is a perfect way for kids to practice their impulse control,” writes Green, “and the feeling words boost their emotional awareness.”