An Indoor Play Activity
What’s the ultimate game for children? One they make up themselves.
Materials Required:
- Large piece of posterboard
- Pieces of cardboard and paper
- Crayons and markers
- Buttons
- Dice
- Timer
Instructions:
What’s the ultimate game for children? One they make up themselves.
Supply your child with pieces of cardboard uniformly cut to the same size. (The cardboard you get from the dry cleaner works well.)
You’ll also need a piece of heavy posterboard (good for a game board), crayons, markers, very large buttons (these are great tokens, but they should be kept out of reach of children under three years old).
Finally, provide giant dice (we showed you how to make these in a previous Indoor Play Activity that you can find here), pieces of scrap paper, and a timer.
Now set your child to the task of inventing a game of his or her design.
If your child has trouble getting going, draw a snakelike path of squares to color and talk about special instructions to put on the squares … or pick up the pieces of cardboard and explain how to play fish.
Be patient – at some point, a unique game will emerge.
If all else fails, you can teach your child to play Tegwar, a game described in detail in Mark Harris’s novel Bang the Drum Slowly.
Tegwar stands for The Exciting Game Without Any Rules, and it’s most fun played with a grownup who thinks there must be some kind of system at work.
This Childrens Indoor Play Activity is sponsored by Zane Education – the home of online Visual Learning.
