Play Ideas

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Here are simple ideas for games for babies and children

Click the ideas listed on the right

Kitchen games

A mother spends a lot of time in the kitchen and pre-school age children are often right under her feet.  Here are kitchen play ideas that children will love. They may even benefit you.

·   Washing up.  You need unbreakable kitchen gear e.g. metal or plastic.  Run warm water into the sink, add a little detergent.  Let your child stand on a chair.  A toddler will happily use the dish mop for ages washing kitchen items.  Result, rarely used items in the cupboards get rinsed clean.

· Mop the floor.  If the washing up water has splashed onto the floor, your little helpers will love to sop it up with mop or cloths.

 · Shopping.  A perfect game for two or three pre-schoolers.  They will need baskets or bags, a couple of coffee tables or cartons. 

Allow kids to take all the tins and packets out of one shelf of the cupboard and sell them to each other or to you.  You can wipe down the shelf while it is empty.  Kids help you stack the items back in the cupboard at the end of the game.  Result, one clean shelf. 

·Children love to play with cards, sorting them, counting them, studying the pictures,   

Make some sets of cards with a Christmas theme.  Cut symbols from Christmas gift paper and stick them on cardboard to make your cards.  To make them last longer, cover with contact paper.

· Let children use old Christmas cards to make a Christmas book.  They will love cutting and pasting the cards onto folded pages that can be tied together with wool. 

·Find a small bare branch of a tree.  The children might find their own branch.  Stand it in a bucket or flower pot filled with sand or stones. Let the children decorate it with strips of coloured paper, foil, and Christmas cards threaded onto string or wool.  They can have the tree wherever they want to play.

·Take the children to the park and look for cones or unusual seeds from trees.  These make wonderful decorations if painted or sprayed with paint.  Sprinkle on silver or gold glitter while the paint is wet.

·Let children decorate butcher’s paper with painted designs, handprints or vegetable prints.  Use non toxic paint.  Use the paper to wrap gifts for Christmas.

·Buy nasturtium seeds or Sweet Alice.  Let children plant the seeds and care for them.  There is time yet for these to grow into nice plants for gifts for friends or relatives.

·Fold paper to fit into envelopes and get the children to draw or paint a picture on each to make a Christmas card.  Most people love to receive a hand made card.  Some sparkle sprinkled onto wet glue will make the pictures look special and delight the child too.

·Supervise the children while they make chocolate crackles.  These make a wonderful gift.

· Help children to make a needle or pin holder for Mum or Grandma.  Cut two pieces of felt 20cms ( 8ins) x 10cms (4 ins.)  Fold felt in half and stitch together with a couple of stitches to make a little book.  Cut a triangle for the roof.  Let child stick or stitch the triangle in place also a door and window of different colour felt.  Pins and needles will stick easily into the felt house.  This pin and needle holder will last for many years.

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Balls
Balls have delighted children since the dawn of time.  There are so many games to play with them. 

Choose a ball that suits your child’s stage of development.  Here are some things to consider:

• size.  Make sure a ball will not fit into a baby’s mouth

• small balls are hard for little hands to catch

• fabric - a hard ball may hurt a child’s face 

• balls are easy to make - stuff socks or net fruit-bags with paper or fabric

• golf  and cricket balls are unsuitable for pre-schoolers

• some games require protective gear in ball games, e.g., shin pads, helmets

• families can play ball together

Today’s children have sophisticated games and equipment but balls remain popular. As children learn ball-skills, their hands and arms will grow stronger.  Ball games provide exercise for many muscles and give mental stimulation.  People of all ages and levels of mobility love balls.

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Boxes
At my house we’ve had a big cleanup and sent a lot of strong boxes to the recycling centre.  Boxes make wonderful play things and cost nothing.  A box can become a boat, train, car, aeroplane, table, chair, bed, cupboard and countless other things. 

Boxes can:

·stimulate the imagination

· encourage manipulative skills (using fingers and hands to open and close, balance etc.)

·encourage gross motor skills (climbing, lifting, carrying)

·teach concepts (size, shape, position e.g., under, in, on top, behind)

·provide useful for storage

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Drawing

A toddler between 15 and 18 months of age has good hand control and is at an ideal age to watch older children and adults draw.  They will love to have a turn.  Thick, stubby, non-toxic crayons are ideal for little hands to hold.  Crayons are very satisfying because they mark without the child pressing hard.  At first the child will only make strokes on the page. 

Here are some hints:

·Cheap books or pads of blank page or even newsprint are good for the toddler to learn on

·Teach your child to draw only on the paper, not on other books or furniture

·Have a special place to keep paper and drawings

·Put the crayons away after drawing time

·Use fridge magnets to display a picture regularly on the fridge

·Praise your child’s efforts

·Draw for your children but remember they won’t be able to copy your art.  Scribble is a necessary part of learning to draw and paint

·Make a special time for drawing, maybe before bed or before mealtime.

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Listening games
Listening is necessary for communication and is a big part of learning to read and write.  Playing listening games is fun and will help your child.

·You need several soft toy animals or plastic farm or zoo animals.  Take turns with your child to make an animal speak, asking for something e.g., food.  Listen to the sound then pick up the appropriate animal.  This listening game can become a storytelling game as each animal is moved about.

·You need several sound makers e.g. rattle, drum, blocks to clap together, bell, squeaking toy.  The listener turns his/her back or hides eyes while the other person uses one sound maker.  The listener then finds the item that made the sound and has a turn making the sound.

·You need a small bell.  Take the bell and hide in another room.  Ring the bell until the child finds you by following the sound.  The child then hides in a different place while you seek.

For these games you don’t need instruments.  Many household items can be used from paper to stones, saucepans to scrubbing brushes.  Experiment with making many sounds for your child to hear.

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Music and Your Baby

Even before birth babies respond to music.  Quiet, rhythmic music will soothe, and loud stirring music will stimulate movement in the foetus.  My firstborn was so excited by the sound track of the film Ben Hur, that I went into labour and he was born a month early.

Music can be an aid to settling baby to sleep, especially when used as part of a routine.  Research proves that babies respond best to high pitched voices so if you are using taped or CD music, lullabies sung by females are a good choice. 

From birth, my daughter used soft recorded music every time she put her baby back to bed after a feed.  The effect was excellent.  The baby grew to know the music meant sleep time. In fact, before she was walking, she lay down on the floor and shut her eyes when I put on the tape for her one day. 

Music stimulates the brain and helps listening skills, language development, memory, and muscle coordination.  However, silence is important too.  There should not be continual music in anyone’s life and loud music can damage the hearing.

 Here are some musical activities

1. sing lullabies to baby
2. sing nursery rhymes at nappy changing time
3. place baby’s bassinet near wind chimes
4. hang tinkly bells where baby’s movement will activate them
5. give baby a rattle to shake.  Choose one with a pleasant sound
6. find toys that play a tune when the cord is pulled
7. toddlers love busy boxes that make a variety of sounds

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Autumn games

Here are some leaf ideas you can use with your child

• Take your child to the park and collect leaves

• Play sorting games using the leaves-sort in sizes, shapes, colours

• Count the leaves

• Use an iron to press some leaves between sheets of waxed lunch paper

• Draw a simple tree shape and help your child to stick on autumn leaves using tape or glue

• Float autumn leaves in the water at bath time

• Cut sprays of leaves to put in vases

• Allow kids to stick leaves on sheets of paper to make a collage

• Let kids rake up piles of leaves

• Lie on the grass and let kids cover you with leaves, or cover your child’s body this way

• Rake leaves and jump on the pile

• Kids put leaves in barrow and take to garden or compost heap – good exercise and a learning activity

• Put a leaf under paper then scribble on the paper, to reveal the leaf shape and veins

• Arrange leaves on contact plastic and cover with more contact.  This will make a pretty picture to hang up or to give as a gift.

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Games for the car

When I was a small child, the parents of only one of my friends had a car.  There were never cars lined up outside the school.  Children traveled to school by foot or bus and went by train for holidays.  How different it is today. There are millions of cars on the road in holiday time. Many families have more than one car and busy working mothers or carers collect children by car and ferry them to after school activities or home. 

It is very distracting to have fighting or crying children in the car. This happens even on short drives when children are tired, hungry, or need the adult’s attention.  Avoid these situations by providing some simple activities.  It is important each child has something to do or is involved in the chosen family game.  Choose games to suit the ages of the children

• Provide a baby with things to watch or hold

• Make sure baby toys can’t be dropped out of reach

• Keep small puzzles in the glove box.  These are only for use when driving

• Let each child have a car bag with a variety of small toys that are regularly changed

• Play a tape of children’s songs, and encourage kids to sing along

• Encourage kids take turns to recite rhymes

• Help Pre-schoolers can learn to recognize traffic signs

• Ask kids to look for their name letter on cars, shops, street signs

• Get them to look for their age number on letterboxes

• Tell the children some interesting news or fact that you have discovered during the day

• Ask kids to suggest solutions to an imaginary situation e.g. What would you do if a wild animal got into our house?

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Bean Bags

Bean bags are easy to make.  Sew together two 15 or 16 cms squares of material (5or 6 inches).  Leave a small opening until the bag has been partly filled with rice, split peas, or dried seeds of some kind.  The bag, should still be floppy floppy and feel comfortable to clasp.  Bean bags are ideal for children to catch as they will not hurt the child’s face or fingers.  Here are some bean bag games to play:

An adult throws bean bags around the room.  Child sees how many bean bags he/she can collect and put in a bucket, before a timer goes off. Make your bean bags from brightly coloured material and use them for colour recognition and counting games as well.

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Goop

Have you heard of Goop?  It is cheap and easy to make, not very messy and is calming to use.  It is just the right play material to calm a child down after some exciting physically active games. And children love it. Make it by slowly adding a cup full of water to a packet of cornflour. Use it white or colour with food colouring. Present it to your child in a baking dish. The goop feels hard at first then as your fingers clutch it the goop becomes silky and smooth.  Let if fall in strings or loops, squiggles and hoops onto paper or cardboard or just onto a laminated table top or the kitchen bench. It can be re-used if you use a kitchen spatula to scrape it back into the dish. Store it as it is in the fridge or let the water dry off and break up the solid cornflour to mix with water again.

Windy weather games

Where I live, Spring is often very windy.  Feathers, bubbles and streamers are fun to use on a windy day, and it is an ideal time to fly a kite.  The simplest kite is a piece of paper with a string attached. Provide a sheet of paper with  paint or colours or scraps of paper to paste on, as decorations.  Tie a piece of string to a corner of the kite.  Do not make the string very long because of safety issues.  

Give your a child a stick on which you have tied a bunch of coloured paper streamers. It is fun to wave in the wind, listening to the sound it makes. Tie some streamers on a fence or a tree.  These games will help your child learn about the wind.

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Clay

Summer will soon be here and getting wet and dirty will be something most kids enjoy.  Clay is a wonderful medium for kids to explore and they can be strengthening their arms and hands, and learning about pottery at the same time.  Buy a lump of potter’s clay from your hobby shop or artist’s supply store.  Cut the clay into lumps that can be easily handled by children.  Show them how to remove any air pockets in the clay by thumping their clay on a solid table or bench.  Children really love thumping clay, as usually they are being told to be careful or quiet.  An outside table under a tree is an ideal place to set up as any mess will be easy to clean up. Have a bowl of water within reach so everyone can keep their hands moist.  After a good thumping it is time to shape the clay.  It can be squeezed, rolled, patted, poked, pinched, broken up and more.  Objects can be poked into the clay.  Paddle pop sticks and matchsticks and shells can be used to make impressions or can be embedded in the clay. 

If you are lucky, you will be able to find a potter who will show children how clay pots of different types are made.  If not, demonstrate yourself.  At the end of clay time, scrape the clay from the table and kids can help wedge the clay again into a lump.  Make a good sized dent in it and fill this with water.  This will keep the clay moist if you pop it into a plastic bag and store in a plastic container as well. 

Children may want to paint and keep their sculptures or items.  They will harden well if dried in the sun.  Some centres will know a potter who will fire items for the children and these make wonderful Christmas gifts.

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Sand

Sand is one of the most loved natural play mediums available to children.  Whether it is wet or dry there is lots that kids can do with it, even if only a small amount is available.  Sand play is wonderful exercise for hands, feet, and the whole body. It can be used to introduce new vocabulary, and early maths and science concepts. For example:

Buried treasure: Maths

• Hide small plastic animals or toys in the sand. 

• How many did you hide?

• How many have you found

• Bury the treasure in a deep or shallow hole.   

• How many holes will we need to bury these toys? (One to one concept)

Use sieves, sand and seeds: Thinking

• What goes through the sieve

• What stays in the sieve?

• Why?

Science: Sand castles and moats

• Make ditches in wet sand and pour in water.

• What happens to the water? 

• Why?

• Can we find the water again?

• How long does it take for the sand to dry out?

Patterns in the sand: Experimenting, observing

In wet and dry sand use:

• Rakes, sticks, kitchen implements feet, hands, cones anything that is lying about, to make impressions 

• Make a matching game – what made this mark? 

• Compare the marks made in wet and dry sand.

Art and sand:

Spread glue on paper or cardboard.  Child sprinkles dry sand over the paper using fingers or a very small funnel.  Leave to dry then shake off excess sand leaving a sand picture on the paper.

Talk to your child about the sand games.  Remember to protect the sand from animals so that it remains clean.

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Nature's Treasures

Holiday time is a good time to collect things from nature.  Whether you are at the beach, out in the bush, at a park, walking along a suburban street, or in the back yard, there are natural things to be collected. You might find

• a crab’s claw

• a cicada shell

• an interesting bit of driftwood

• small bits of seaweed

• a feather

• a few pebbles

• seed pods

• flowers

• moss

• leaves

• snail shells

• grasses

Show your child how to arrange the treasures on a piece of cardboard cut from a cereal packet.  Provide glue so pieces can be kept in place. Allow child to keep this picture on a desk or dressing table. Talk about each piece - colour, feel, size, shape, smell, where it has been found, discuss how  it got there.

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Chimes

At Christmas we received some wonderful wind chimes to hang near the front door. The special feature of these chimes is that they are tuned to the pentatonic scale so that whenever the breeze blows it is as if someone is playing a pleasant tune on them. Wind chimes we’ve had in the past, refused to make any sound at all even when the wind blew.

Children love playing chimes too. Help them to make a set of hanging sounds in the garden. Bits of scrap metal, a terracotta pot hung by threading strong, knotted twine through the drainage hole, old saucepan lids, plastic pipes, bamboo of different lengths and many other scrap items can be hung up for children to rattle together or strike with a rod or ruler. Add some cardboard rolls that can be blown through like didgeridoos, and some plastic bottles containing pebbles to use as shakers, and the children will spend loads of time playing the instruments and singing along with their band. This music won’t be as tuneful as my new chimes but if you hang them well away from the house, the sound won’t worry you and will give the children such pleasure.

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Tiny things for tiny hands

My little grand daughter, Estelle, loves to handle tiny things. When her father has his tools out, she takes all the small nails, screws and other interesting items out of the box and plays with them. When playing with older children, she is often given small toys and she particularly likes to put them into small boxes or cups. Estelle also likes to play with my reels of cotton, scraps of material and shells. Many children under three put things in their mouths or noses or even ears, so close supervision is always needed.

When I taught in a child care centre, I found that pre-schoolers loved to sort colourful things such as pencils, feathers, the lids from texta colours, cards of paint colours, paper clips, and stones, as well as commercially made cards and toys. Children would sort in different ways such as  colour, size, shape or construction material. Not only does this help concentration, and cognitive understanding, but also gives good practise in finger/hand control. When babies first begin to pick up items they use their whole hand  (the palmer grip). By the time they are toddling, they use finger and thumb (pincer grip) for small items. Watch a young child measuring something in a spoon, trying to use scissors or to do up buttons and they seem very clumsy. It takes a great deal of practice for fingers to do little tasks easily.

Look around your home and see what interesting, free small items you can find. Put them in some containers and let your child explore them. Help your child to develop clever fingers by giving him/ her lots of interesting finger tasks.

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Cars

Cars are timeless toys that are popular from babies to grandparents. Given opportunity and encouragement, they are as popular with girls as with boys. Sometimes special areas at a centre or special times need to be set aside for girls to engage in car play, for boys tend to dominate or insist the cars belong to them. The same applies to boys with doll play. Boys need the opportunity and encouragement to use dolls and the items in the doll or home corner. It is not a place exclusively for girls.

With so much of a child’s life centred on cars from birth, it is no wonder that by age three children know about seatbelts, baby capsules, tyres, brakes, gears, petrol, servicing, parking, traffic signs and much more.

Big cars are expensive but small toy cars are cheap, easy to store and can be a great way for kids to learn about their community. When you are buying new cars for them, buy vehicles with different uses – farm vehicles, emergency vehicles, vans, tow-trucks, horse floats, police car, taxis etc. Talk about who would drive each vehicle and help your child to make games and simple stories involving them. Blocks, boxes, cylinders and pieces of cardboard are great things to use in car play. They can be used to construct bridges, garages, roads, buildings, hoists, tunnels and your child will find other uses for them.

Look in the Open Road and in Sunday newspaper magazine pages for great coloured pictures of cars. Four year olds will love to cut them out. They can also be used in mix and match games and are useful to encourage conversation between children and adults. Ask open ended questions such as 'who do you think drives this car? How much petrol will you buy today? What do you think this driver has in the car-boot?'

You’ll be surprised what your child knows. Try out a car game today.

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Fun with feet

Babies examine things with eyes, mouth, hands and feet. As they grow we encourage children to taste only food and to examine other things by looking and touching. In our society it isn’t long before most children are wearing shoes and the part of the environment that they feel with their feet, is restricted. Our toes, that have so much potential, are not taught many skills.

This month why not encourage your children to have some fun with feet. Prepare different mats to stand on such as cardboard, crepe paper, cellophane, carpet, coir matting, sandpaper, crumpled newspaper, corrugated iron or corrugated plastic sheeting, etc. Each mat should be about the size of one of those foot mats for the car.  Get everyone in the family to stand on each mat in turn and wriggle their toes around. When the family has tried out the mats and talked about how they feel under the bare feet, alter the positions of the mats and try walking along them blindfold. Can everyone name them? This is a great game for using in childcare centres too.

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Copyright 2008