Fast Soccer/Baseball Game For Kids

I have been working to get the kids rolling out the door by 8am so we have an hour of play time before school. We are not on track yet but we are getting some play time in this week.

One morning we got to the park with our soccer ball and about 10 minutes to play a game. Finn asked to play baseball but we had a soccer ball.

So, we quickly came up with our modified soccer/baseball game:

• One person rolls (pitches) the ball to the batter/kicker.
• The kicker must kick the ball out of the infield into the grass in the outfield to score a homerun. 
• If the pitcher or fielder (there are only 3 of us) stop the ball from hitting the grass then the kicker is out.
• 3 kicks with a miss or foul balls result in the player being out.

Not many rules, loads of fun and easy to "miss" the ball as you try to stop it with your foot so younger ones get some homeruns ;-)

Letter War

My youngest is having some trouble deciphering letter case and with recognizing a couple letters.  So, how to make learning letters fun?

I came up with Letter War.  This is like the standard card game of War but instead of a deck of playing cards you print out a deck with upper and lower case letters on the cards.  Now play the game with the letter deck and score like this:

• Uppercase beat lowercase letters.
• The ranking from lowest to highest is: a..z,A..Z
• If the same lower and upper case letter is played then it is war.  This is less common in this deck of course.

Pretty simple I think.  Let's look at some examples:

• E and t are played: A wins
• A and a are played: War
• J and M are played: M wins
• c and v are played: c wins

First Day Back to School for New Year or Loot Alternate Rules

Monday was the boys first day back to school.  I got to get in some guitar practice, some reading, and a stationary cycling workout.

On the tutoring of the boys front I front loaded the fun to follow, wrestling with Dad, with homework first.  The boys love to wrestle and so they quickly did their homework and we went wrestling.  They love to tag team me and pile on for the title of World Champion.

After some rough housing we took a break and played some Loot.

The problem with Loot though is that the rules were a bit complex for my 5 year old.  Hence we came up with some adjustments to target areas my youngest needs to work on (Math) and which were easier to understand (given our other favourite games, like Uno) and to play.  I did this by enlisting their input on which rules would be good and not mentioning my ulterior motive to work on Math ;-)

So, we quickly adopted our Scourge of the High Seas rules:

• Most gold coins on a card or pirate skulls on a card wins a round.
• If the gold coins and pirate skulls are tied the Pirate card wins.
• Losers have to pick up a card.
• Adopting an Uno rule, when a player gets down to 1 card they must call "Plunder" like a Pirate or they have to pick up two cards.
• If a Pirate captain is played they beat all other cards.
• If two or more Pirate captains are played then you must draw 3 new card face up.  The hand with the most gold wins the round.
• The first player with no cards wins.
• If the deck gets exhausted then the discard pile is reshuffled and used again until someone runs out of cards to be the Scourge of the High Seas.

We then switched the rules again.  This time we played Pirate Knock Downs:

• Line up the Gold cards against the wall.
• Each player takes 7 pirate ship cards.
• Each player takes turns throwing cards at the standing Gold cards.
• If a player knocks down 1 or more gold cards they take them.
• The knocked down cards are replaced.  Then the next player takes their turns.
• The player with the most gold at the end is the Pirate Winner.
• In case of a tie, a shootout is played (we did not need this rule).