Last night, as I rinsed the dinner dishes, I watched out of my window as my three boys played soccer in the backyard. Well, the 8-year-old and 6-year-old played soccer; the 2-year-old ran back and forth, always three steps behind both his brothers and the ball, shouting into the wind. His one attempt to get a kick in resulted in a Charlie-Brown-esque back-plant, at which point it was time to drag him inside for bath time, howling the whole way.
It’s hard to find games that all ages of children can play together, without the older ones getting bored and the little kids getting frustrated (or vice versa). An exception is tag, which most kids under 10 can get into, especially if you have some sort of wacky variation up your sleeve. A surprising crowd-pleaser is Alphabet Tag. You can vary the rules to suit children’s literacy level, but in the end, it gets everyone running, with a learning component to boot.
You need:-Chalk. (You can’t beat Crayola’s, for its color selection and smooth-writing angled top):
-A sizable and smooth asphalt or cement surface (like a driveway or blacktop)
-Write letters A-Z, spacing them out and varying orientation and placement throughout the playing field
Big-kid variation: Encourage kids 5 and up to write the letters themselves.
-Designate a person who’s “it.” The person who’s “it” calls out a letter, and runs around the perimeter of the playing area once. The other players need to find the letter and try to beat whomever is “it” to the letter that was called. Big-kid variation: Choose a category for every round, such as fruit, countries, ice cream flavors, etc. The person who’s “it” calls out a word in that category, and runs around the perimeter of the playing field once. The other players find the first letter of the word and try to beat whomever is “it” to that letter.
-When a person is tagged before reaching the right letter, he or she becomes “it.”
If your children balk at the not-so-sly educational component of this particular game, remind them that you could, instead, be inside doing chores or paying bills while they figure out a game for themselves. I find that kids value pretty much any dedicated playtime with the busy grown-ups in their lives, and so I might as well engage them in something at least semi-enriching (as long as it’s fun, too, of course). And this is just the kind of game that can bring you right into the colder months of fall and even winter, as long as there’s no snow or ice to contend with.
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