kids

Hot potato (the active version)

Grab some music and plan to be a ref or use your phone timer. Now sure, you could wrap up a potato in foil, cook it in the oven and play the old school method, or just grab a ball.

Here’s a twist: say you have two or more kids. Clear some space and get them setup to run from one side of the room to the other. Have them sit against the wall or whatever will be your one side. When they have the ‘potato’, they have to run with it and touch it to the other wall then bring it back to the next person. Keep going until the timer runs out!

Shake it up some more?

Instead of just running one side of the room to the other, setup a trail that has to be run. Example: run to each bedroom or run a particular path.

Have fun!

Dance party!

This one’s pretty unstructured, but you’d be amazed. Grab your phone, or whatever audio system you use, throw on an upbeat tune and start jamming. Bonus points: scream “it’s dance party time!” loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

Variations

  • Stop the song and yell out a color and a body part. Example: yellow nose! And everyone has to run and touch their nose to something yellow.
  • Get a conga line moving through your house.
  • During the dance, yell out that you can only dance on one leg (be sure to switch).

Can you think of others?

The kids are stuck at home, now what?

I’m kicking off this blog in an effort to help families out in our current situation. There’s a global crisis going on (Corona virus) which has many families on lockdown and many children’s events/activities being cancelled. With all this extra energy just lying around the house, two things are surely to happen: first, kids are going to go stir crazy, and second, the parents are going to lose their minds because they don’t know how to give their kids constructive physical outputs.

I used to coach gymnastics for over 10 years. When we held classes, it wasn’t just about doing rolls and flips, but keeping the kids active. I was a firm believer that parents weren’t spending hard earned cash to watch their kids stand in lines. So, often times I had to get creative to figure out how to keep kids moving the entire class. We referred to it as circuits. 8 kids in a class? Guess what, I’m going to shoot for 8 stations at each circuit we setup for that day.

I want to use this blog to share some of that creativity with you, the parents out there that are currently trying to figure out now, “what do I do with all this pent up energy?!”