More Activities for Children in the Fall

Here are some Indoor activities that are inexpensive and fun for all.

Stacking Cup Towers:

Because I work with many children I have oped to buy different colored cups so that they can choose to work alone, and have their own color, or work together and build something bigger.  When working with cup stacking, I usually give them one color to work with. That is usually a 50 cup pack.  Once they have conquered using all of those cups into a tower without knocking it over, we move onto the next color.

It appears in this picture they chose to work together and one child’s foot took out the little girls tower… They do have many opportunities to learn tolerance with this activity.

Costco sells 200 count packs for just about $10.  I gave a package of these to my Great Niece when we went to visit and it was a smashing hit.  Every day that we were there, she wanted to get them out and play.. It was a lot of fun for me see how creative she could be.  Her little sister loved making a game of stacking them back together.  So even clean up is a fun activity with these cups.  I hope you will try them.

Note: children will like kicking these over, and they might dent and crack.  learning to pop them back into shape is learning something also, so relax, set boundaries, but try not to yell a lot about breaking the cups.  You can still use them if they crack.  Smile, breath deep and let them play.  The cost is less than a meal at McDonald’s.

If I have a group of older children and they run out of ideas to do.  I have them sit back to back and build a wall around themselves.  This is fun with just 2 or more, I have had 6 children working on a wall around themselves.  Good fun for a family get together like Thanksgiving.

Punching Balls in the Air:

When the weather outside is frightful, there are not a lot of large motor skill opportunities that you don’t get to do inside.  At the dollar store I was able to buy these punching balls.  I think there were 3 in a pack.  These turned out to be a full week of fun.  On Monday each child received their own ball. I used a sharpie to write their names on each one. They used them like punching balls, and then we played that you had to try to hit it up into the air and not let it touch the ground.  Hours of movement and fun.  This is an activity for all ages.  The big children like to use their heads to bounce them on.  The small children like to push or bounce on top of theirs.  Again good fun for little money.

Outdoors fun with leaves:

I realize that not everyone has a tree that drops all these leaves.  I don’t either. We started off by taking a field trip into town where there is a Tree with lots of leaves to loose.  We took a rake, and Large Garbage Bags.  The children and I took turns raking the leaves into piles then we all worked together to pack them into the bags. This pile is 2 large bags full. We loaded those bags into the van and came home.  Dumped those leaves into the back yard and we had weeks of fun for free.

We spent time throwing them up in the air, raking them back into a pile and doing it again.  Jumping into the pile was a favorite also.  Then My favorite was when I got to bury them…

I then took pictures, had the pictures printed and asked the children what and who was in each picture.  This was great fun.  They each had a good time trying to identify each other through the leaves. I framed these and gave them to the parents for gifts.

You can look here for other outdoor Fall activities.  My hope for you, is that you will at least try one of these Fall activity’s.  They are great fun.  I would love to hear how you like them.  Granny