Favorite Outdoor Games You Play with Your Kids

Mine are little, so other than running around, we like racing across the grass at the park as different animals. Our favorites are bear walking and crab walking. We also seem to become dragons and hack limbs off of each other (gently of course!). :) I am looking forward to some of the more structured games when they are older, like different kinds of tag.

Huh. We don't really play games outside, although we're outside nearly all day, every day. What we do do outside:

- snowboard in the winter (and make snowforts, etc)
- swim & sail in the summer
- climb trees
- walks with the dog
- yard work
- gardening (food)
- school work
- skate
- ride bikes
- soccer/baseball/basketball/calvin-ball
- cloud watching & daydreaming
- sidewalk chalk drawings
- walk to the store/ classes/ restaurants
- picnic
- read books
- puddle jumping
- kite flying
- building (as in fences, chicken coop, treehouse, etc.)
- painting (the above)
- sand castles, sand candles
- backyard camping

It's just kiddo and I though (well the dog, too) Red rover doesn't work so swell with just 2 people and a labrador

This is a good indoor and outdoor game... Hot and Cold. My grandma used to play it with us all the time when she just wanted to sit in her chair while watching us.

Have the kids (And you) take turns hiding an object. It has to be something that can be easily hide but something cheap in case the person who hid it forgets where they hid it (It happens a lot with little kids :)) Then everyone (Except the person who hid the object) tries to find it. The person who hid the object will tell you if you are hot (close to the object) or cold (far away from the object)... If you're playing with really little ones like 2-5 year olds you can also say "You're getting warmer" or "You're getting colder".

It always was (And still is) one of my favorite games.

Cops and robbers and ghost in the graveyard are also both good ones.

Kick the can...the neighbors always join in and it's big fun!

Mother May I? and Simon Says... BIG hits!!!

Not sure of the age(s) your kid(s) are but here are a few I do with 2-10 year olds:

Kicking the ball around (could try to play a simple game of soccer)
Rolling the ball to each other, throwing it to each other (good for eye/hand coordination)
Drawing with chalk on the sidewalk (could play tic/tac/toe, draw a big life size type board game)
Kiddie Pool, we have a magnetic fishing set to be used in the water
Simon Says
Pick all the yellow dandelions (parents like this because then we have less weeds spreading)
Follow the leader
Frisbee
Find the bacon (hide a piece of fabric and they try to find it)
Red Light, Green Light (my daughter also likes adding in yellow light to go slow)
Flashlight tag
Scavenger/Treasure Hunt
Bubbles (pop as many as you can)
Hot Potato (can do with a water balloon or a ball of various sizes)
Basketball (there are various sizes of hoops now)
Pretending to be different animals
Nature Walk (collect various things and then make a collage)
Hide-N-Seek
Red Rover (with a group)
Hopscotch
Capture the flag

go to www.vgames-simplyfun.com. Active Outdoor Games, fun games that have existed for hundreds and thousands of years!

I sometimes used to pick up huge appliance boxes and let the kids attach them to each other. The we moms would go in and cut through them to make mazes..We would also place some eye holes so the kids could look out or we could look in. It was pretty funny to see those little eyeballs or fingers peeking out.. We would then give them flashlights to crawl through there at night..

We also had the kids play

Simon says (we let them call out sometimes and all of the parens would also play as the kids called out the Simon says..

Freeze - the caller turns their back to every one. Everyone walks towards the caller, The caller yells freeze and turns around, anyone still moving is out. The first person to reach the caller wins and gets to call the next game.

Hula hoops, jump ropes, Traffic.. We used to use chalk to make streets with traffic signs, parking spaces on the drive way.. We would park a vehicle on the street across the drive way so the kids did not accidentally ride into the street.

We would build forts with old sheets, swing sets and patio furniture.

Lemonade and bake sale stand..
We found out at Garage sales you can make good money selling lemonade and Pickles.. You know those giant Jars of pickles.. People love those..

Hi Kim,

I'm glad you asked this question! My husband and I were just talking about this this morning. We have three older kids 14, 18 and 19. They all are so hooked on computers and texting that we never seen them go outside once this craze started. We feel if we knew then, what we know now, things would be so different!

Kickball was our favorite and we use to play it everyday! Also Volleyball played "over the fence" as well as Bad-mitten is fun for smaller ones as well as teens and you don't have to worry about putting up a net. If you have neighbors that have kids they could play each other across the fence it's a lot of fun. Red Rover is another old game that kids of all ages love.

We use to have a Bait Shop in our neighborhood and the kids in our neighborhood on Thursday nights would spray down our lawn if it didn't rain, get our flashlights with a mason jar or deep container and catch worms! We would sell them to the Bait Shop owner for 5 cents a pound and then he sold them to his customers for a higher profit I'm sure that came in on Friday night for weekend fishing! We was able to take our 5 cents put our money together and buy something we could all use. We were so thrilled! The kids today would not dare do this, "we thought" 2 weeks ago, one of the kids had a friend come over and he was going fishing the next day. He needed worms and so we wet the grass down and waited for about two hours. The kids got out flashlights and out they went to pull worms from the ground! They had so much fun and they were laughing so hard that we had to tell them to be quiet or they would scare the worms back into the ground! The kids I am talking about were 18 and 19!

I hope you can manage to keep your child or children playing outside as long as you can, the older they get the harder it is to get them outside. It's so hard to get the kids out on hot days we use to just put out a sprinkler and they played in it for hours.

Oh this brings back so many memories for me! Summer, how time fly's by.

Have a great one!

B. C

Kick the Can, Ghost in the Graveyard, and Spud are our favorites. And kickball and baseball when we have enough kids.

When I was little, we also used to play a game we called "School", in which we would sit on the bottom step of the porch (in Kindergarten) and then have to guess in which hand the "teacher" was holding a stone. If we guessed right, we moved up to the next step (first grade) and so on. Hot and cold was always fun, too.
Have fun and a great summer!