Young children can be boundless fountains of energy, and it can be simply exhausting for many parents. The problem only gets worse when your home becomes the base for a sleepover and you’ve got two or three or even more extra kids to keep occupied. If you find that the children are out of control and have some excess energy to burn (and don’t they always?) organizing even the most basic kids games can be a great way to channel that energy. Not only will it help calm the kids down and keep them focused, many games have great mental and physical tests that will help the children develop their skills.
If you have access to a yard, that’s an excellent place to set up a game for some kids. If you have access to the right supplies and enough kids, setting up some kind of team sport is an easy and fun idea. You can use makeshift items for bases for baseball or kickball, or just stick some poles in the ground and call them a soccer goal. Sports can be a great way to interact with the kids, too, provided that you can swallow your pride and let them win a little bit, of course.
Other great outdoor games include such kids games as capture the flag. Games like this can be a simple or as complex as you want them to be. You might set up the rules as simply: get the other team’s flag and get back to your flag. You can spice it up by letting the teams choose where to hide their flags. Or, you might even have a game with more advanced rules featuring spies that can go find the flag’s location, and jails where players can be captured and held until rescued by a teammate. The possibilities are endless – mix it up, and keep the kids engaged.
If you’re limited to the indoors, there are still plenty of different fun games to choose from. The simplest choice is simply to break out a board game or card game – there are many fun games that also have educational components. Or, you could set out some arts and crafts supplies, and have the children work on creating something unique. You could set up a makeshift game show to test the knowledge that the kids have picked up in school, for instance. As always its best to be creative – keep the kids engaged and they’ll have fun and learn at the same time.
You can ever play games on the go. When you get sick of your child asking, “Are we there yet?” You can improvise some fun games that will test children’s memories or observational skills. Try challenging the kids to point out objects that begin with different letters of the alphabet, starting with A, or having them find letters and words in billboards and road signs. Play along, and you might just find the time passes faster for you, too.
