Jubilee Picture Trail
Print out some pictures of the Queen and hide them around your garden. Send your little ones off the find all the pictures!
Outdoor Games
Hopscotch kept many wartime children occupied as all you needed was chalk and an object to throw. We have enjoyed playing hopscotch together during lockdown as its great for a bit of fun exercise, practising numbers, aiming and balancing!
A fun game to play with all the family is Jacks! I love how it is really easy to pick up! All you do is throw the Jacks (plastic or metal pieces with 4 or 6 legs) into your playing circle so they scatter a little and then with a bouncy ball, throw the ball into the air and at the same time try to pick up a Jack before catching the ball again (it can bounce once). Keep going until you don’t pick up a Jack or miss catching the bouncy ball and then it’s the next players turn. If you don’t have actual Jacks, try making some out of pieces of lego!
How many marble games do you know? This is probably best suited to older children, who can understand the safety briefing that marbles should not be put in mouths! Whether you build a marble run or play the classic marble game by drawing a chalk circle on the ground and trying to knock as many marbles out from the chalk circle as possible with your rolling marble. If you succeed you keep the knocked out marble and score a point. The player with the most points wins! Another marble game to create at home is a marble mini-golf course. Just dig a small hole in the garden and then create a course out of toys, shoes and ramps!
Board Games
A family classic, Monopoly can be traced back to 1903 in the USA, but it was first brought to the UK in 1941 by the British Secret Intelligence Service. A special edition was created for prisoners of war held by the Nazis and they held secret maps, compasses and other objects useful for escaping! The game was also developed using British localities like we see today!
We love Snakes & Ladders! It originated in India as a family dice board game and brought to the UK in Victorian times. Ladders represented generosity & faith and the snakes were seen as vices suck as murder & theft. By the 1940’s, the majority of the Indian cultural references had been replaced with British images but the image of snakes were still retained.
A game I had never heard of before is Sorry! which was developed in Southend-on-Sea in 1929. The idea of the game is to get all your pieces (or pawns) from the start to the home box. The pawns are moved in relation to the draw of a card from a deck of cards and you can move the pawns either forwards or backwards depending on the draw of the card.
