Last week I was sitting on the porch steps (yes, being a lazy nature lover) and the kids were begging me to get out in the grass and play with them. But I just couldn’t muster up enough creativity or energy to do so. Suddenly, inspiration hit! I told Lydia we would play a special game. We would start a mini-game and when I yelled STOP, she had to freeze until I told her what the next mini-game was. She was thrilled!
We played this game for an hour at least. Each mini-game lasted anywhere between 1 minute and 10 minutes depending on how much she liked it. When I yelled STOP she would freeze (and giggle) until I gave new instructions.
We have done this several days since then usually at her request. Here are some of her favorite mini-games:
1. Nature Soup–pick 10 different pieces of nature and put them in a bucket, mix, “cook” and serve to everyone else.
2. Rock Names–find one rock for each letter of your name. Place in order on the ground.
3. Animal Mimic–pretend to be a monkey {oooh! oooh! eee! eee! aah! aah!, search for bananas and pick fleas out of each others’ hair}, a bunny {hop up and down, wiggle your nose, look for clover and look for your bunny burrow} or other favorite animals.
4. Hopping Patterns–make patterns out of hopping or steps (ie. jump on one foot, two feet, two feet, one foot; giant step, baby step, hop} and see how many times you can do it before messing up.
5. Personal Relay–run to a bush, pick one leaf and then bring it back to starting point. Continue until you have collected 5 leaves.
6. Knothole Sidewalk Chalk–use the knotholes on your porch to create sidewalk chalk illustrations. We make bunnies, flowers, birds and our favorite–owls!
7. Nature Collection–send kids on a scavenger hunt to find specific items {ie. 3 sticks longer than your hand, 4 different nature items, 1 small rock/1 medium rock/1 large rock}.
8. RUN–there is nothing better than telling your kids to just run up and down the yard 15 times.
9. Ball in the Bucket–stand with toes touching a bucket and drop a ball into it. Then take 1 step back and drop the ball in. Then 2 steps back and drop the ball in. See how many steps you can take while still sinking the ball!
10. Mystery–find something in the yard or woods that does not belong {trash, a strange piece of nature, etc.} and come up with a story as to how it got there.
Do you have quick and easy outside games to add?
Just found your blog through Mandi’s at Doodles place. I Love your blog. I’m putting your button on my blog and following you. These are great ideas. I love doing some of these things with my kids. Especially the running. Run till they can’t run any more.
.-= Rana´s last blog ..Tickling the ivories… =-.
I sit on my porch and give my kids chalk, and tell them to “draw a city for the ants” in the driveway. They need a grocery store! And a mall! And a church! And a school! And roads!” (anything to keep them going…) They get so excited when an ant really walks on it – it’s hillarious.
.-= Jen @ BigBinder´s last blog ..Manifestations of Success =-.
Ehem… we have an abundance of dandelions in our yard, and we like to decorate the trees with them… just pick a flower and push it behind some bark. We also do a lot of soccer… not quite sure what it is we’re doing that’s like soccer, except for the kicking, but the kids like it!
My most favourite game is football and my son also started loving it since i use to watch it online through internet.
Live Football streams
my son like to watch tv, cartoon etc. So sometimes I will asked him to mimic the action he has watched.
Its fun watching him doing certain act sometimes