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Ok, there are vast numbers of "family" games out there, but which ones work for you? Are there any that work well for alllllll the family? I'm thinking evening/rainy day type board (bored?) games. Sadly my kids aren't yet at the age to appreciate risk yet ...
I find Hungry Hippos works well. Put in a few adult variations. allow you 2 year old boy to do whatever he wants, explain this to your 4 year old daughter and it's nothing but laughs!!! 😉
Difficult with young children - I thought I'd go mad if my 3 year old daughter asked me to play snap again! Teenagers can appreciate Risk, Monopoly and even Stockmarket but are we responsible parents to be teaching them the ways of the world? Should we play to win or teach them that the taking part is all important. Personally I hate losing and Monopoly is great when you've got it and totally unfun when you haven't!!
my 4 year old like to "play" chinese checkers. He moves the marbles around whilst i drink coffee and make approprate noises of encouragment!
actually a cool thing i discovered recently which is great with the boys (4 and 2 ) is going out in to the garden when i get home at 5pm with some big old chalks and we draw cirles and squiggles on the patio which they then jump in and and over - kills the 30 odd mins whilst tea is cooking and burns up some energy. we each have a few colours and it works really well. great thing is the rain washes it all away or they spend the next afternoon with a paint brush and water washing it off, thay love it and its great "us " time. chalks are cheap as chips at The Works.
A cool saturday afternoon thing i found was covering the entire kitchen table with black rubbish liners ( selotape them down) and then get white and green paint and let them go mad with covering the whole thing in handprints etc, when you have finished just throw it all away!!
For my 10 year old nothing beats kicking a football around for half an hour. He's better at it than me but it doesn't much matter. He's more interested in it being time with Dad than it being decent football. I often think I can't face the walk over to the heath but it invariably comes up as "the best thing that happened today" when it comes to bed-time.
I like the paint one, forgot we could paint outside in the summer! Doh!
The kids always want to do painting and it is so messy AND then you end up with 700 paintings (or "masterpieces") that you feel guilty for throwing any away...
Have you seen the Dad games article on the dadtalk website? We tried out 'freaky creatures' the other night when my kids were with me (half term = rain, I do love English summer) but we had a great laugh. Want to get the pictures framed now to remember the evening. Apart from paper & colouring pencils it was free. Any other ideas for games with paper & pencils...figure on more of that rain now that the summer holidays are coming up.... 😆
Have you seen the Dad games article on the dadtalk website?
No. Has it been removed? (Or am I being dense?) I can only find 3 articles on http://www.dadtalk.co.uk/articles.php
Yes agree, a bit tricky to find all the articles! Look on the top right corner of the articles page there is a tiny button called something like 'more articles' - when you click there you see a whole load of articles... navigation could be improved somewhat by making this more prominant... 😉
Cheap fun and games - conkers. Bit of a seasonal speciality of course, but my boys love it.
Don't even think about health and safety and all that PC stuff. I'm sure you can stop them poking the skewer into their hands with a bit of fatherly guidance.
Main problem here is getting them to clear up the mess of broken conkers all over the garden.
I think Fred means this link... (you need to click on the word Articles) http://www.dadtalk.co.uk/list_of_articles.php
On which you can find this - http://www.dadtalk.co.uk/articles/dad_games.php
But threre's also a 'useful links' button which takes you to http://www.dadtalk.co.uk/directory_of_services.php
where you can click on Activities and get a choice of two sites - the best of which is http://www.dadcando.com/
Can't say they are all for me, but as a dad who gets bord with board games, I think I could try some of these.
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