Learn Together

Making up new games together helps children develop key social skills like cooperating and co-planning and exercises important brain skills like interpreting, analyzing, and creating movement.

Materials

  • Masking tape
  • Chalk
  • Colorful construction paper, color paper, or plain paper
  • Crayons or markers
  • Small toys, balls, or stones

Move Together

Reimagine classic playground games to create a brand new one!

First, let’s remember how to play hopscotch!

Now let’s change it up or create a new game inspired by hopscotch and other outdoor games.

  1. Decide how you want to design your course. Do you want to draw your spaces in the shape of a rectangle, like hopscotch? Or a circle? Or a snake? 
  2. You can draw this on a piece of paper first or experiment with different arrangements on the floor. 
  3. Hopscotch uses a game course of squares. Let’s make a game course that uses shapes like circles, animal footprints, or hand shapes instead. 
  4. Draw these shapes on colorful construction paper, colored paper, or plain paper that you can color in with crayons or markers.
  5. Play with different layouts of your shapes on the floor. Use tape if you’re outside so they don’t fly away. How will you move along your course? Will you hop, will you leap, will you dance? 
  6. Use small toys, balls, stones, or design a new object to use as a marker in your course. Will you use your marker to skip over stops in your game course like in hopscotch or will you have different rules?
  7. When you land on each spot will you complete silly tasks like “quack like a duck”, or spell words like “chrysanthemum”? 
  8. Create a list of rules to play your game and come up with a fun and catchy title that represents all of your hard work.

Find inspiration from other games like. . . 

Avoid the Shark, where you create different islands various distances apart and jump from beach to beach to avoid imaginary sharks in the water. 

Alphabet Hop, a game where you use 26 squares with the letters of the alphabet in each. You call out letters and hop from one to another. You can even spell out words by hopping to each letter or come up with words that start or end with that letter. 

Enjoy more silly movement games and change their rules with CMOM at Home like Twister with a Twist or Out Of This World Astronauts Obstacle Course.

If you enjoyed designing your outdoor game, design your own board game with CMOM at Home’s Board Game Bonanza!