Blindfold Tag and Friendly Musical Chairs

My mom's group is blessed to have a wonderful mom who does activities with the little ones while all the other mamas go to another room to have time to talk by themselves. This week she was on vacation, and so I had the chance to be with the little ones as well as the the older children who were still on summer vacation.

I first started with this quick and easy scavenger hunt that tied into our Bible story about the treasure parable. The older kids went crazy scrambling for all the items on the list while the youngsters watched silently. So I asked if we could redo the hunt and had one older person partner up with one toddler/preschooler. This worked much better.

After the story, we played Blindfold Tag, a activity that my friend, Mel came up with. In this game, one person is blindfolded while the other people stand frozen in various parts of the room. The object of the game if for the blindfolded person to search and tag all the people on the team. The other players must stand in their spots during the duration of the game but they can talk to the blind person and direct him/her safely to their location. Everyone was engaged and this turned out to be an indirect lesson on trusting others as well as listening.

Finally, with time still left over and many active kids bursting with energy, I started a game of musical chairs. My plan was to do the traditional musical chairs first and then the non-competitive "Friendly Musical Chairs" version next. But at the first round of the traditional game, one preschooler started crying when she couldn't locate a vacant seat so I quickly moved on to Friendly Chairs.

In non-competitive musical chairs, one chair is removed at each round, and the players need to somehow manage to all sit in the remaining chairs. Inevitably, someone has to end up sitting on someone's lap with the end result of everyone sitting on some poor child's lap. Hilarity ensued at every round with me saying in an incredulous voice, "I don't think it's possible for you to do this!" and they yelling back, "Yes we can!"

It was amazing to see how the older kids took charge and helped the wee ones feel included in this game. The kids and I had a great time. It almost made me feel nostalgic about teaching children.