Child care providers are always on the lookout for fun activities for kids. Having fun and engaging activities for the children in your care is part of creating a joyous child care program. Care Courses offers a one-hour course called A Joyful Life of Caregiving, which will give you great ideas for adding more joy to your child care program.
If you’re looking for fun activities to do with children in your care, try this one from A Joyful Life of Caregiving!
“This Ain’t No Piano” activity directions
Explain that you want to build an instrument out of the children. One by one, have the children lie on the floor on their backs – side by side or zig-zag with each child’s head on the stomach of the previous child. As each child is placed, ask, “What is your sound?” Any Sound that the child can make with his or her mouth is OK. The child must keep the same sound throughout the activity.
When all are placed, you are ready to play the instrument. Children make their sound when you touch the foreheads and continue the sound as long as you are touching them. After children are familiar with the procedure, let them take turns being conductor.
This activity can bring teachers and children together for a simple and fun musical game!
Ideas from the field
In addition to this activity, students who have taken the course have shared their favorite activities in the comments section of the blog! Here are some other great examples:
Homemade bubbles
“I chose bubbles for the most joyous activity! There are lots of really great homemade bubble recipes on the internet. We store bubble liquid in clean glass spaghetti jars. For maximum fun, we enjoy blowing and chasing bubbles outside with my 3 — 5 year olds. The chasing/bubble blowing will keep children engaged for at least 20 minutes. Adults may have to hold the jars or make certain they are safe and stable. Also, be ready to wipe hands so children do not wipe their eyes with soapy hands.”
“The Sleeping Game”
“We call it “the sleeping game”(pantomime game). I call out to all the children to fall asleep and then sing a small tune. In the song, I tell the children what they will ‘be’ when they wake up and then the tune ends, telling the children to wake up. Once ‘awake’, the children act out/move around/make sounds/etc to imitate the thing that they ‘are’. This is great for different themes (i.e. ocean theme you could have them wake up as a fish, octopus, shark, etc) and requires no equipment. It can be played indoors or outside so long as there is enough space for the children to move about.
Toddlers to school aged children enjoy this game and you can make it more or less challenging as appropriate for your group; special considerations would be to make sure all the children in the group know what it is that you’re telling them to be (sometimes the children have requests of what they want to be next and it becomes a turn-taking game as well!). No time limit, you can tell when they have lost interest in the game. The children really enjoy the movement aspect and using their imagination in pretending to be something else, they especially enjoy taking turns calling out what they want to ‘be’ next. I enjoy seeing the different ways the children express their ideas of how to be something different and it is fun and can be challenging thinking of something new for them to ‘be’.”
Role-play fun
“We act out our favorite books. Each student gets to be a different character, they act out the actions as I read the story. They are allowed to interpret them in their own way. We use props made from things we find around the room(blue paper for a river, blocks become a bridge).”
Check out other recommendations from our students and share your own in the comments section!
Care Courses contact
Please let us know how we can be of additional assistance! Call us: 1–800-685‑7610, Monday through Friday, 9–5 ET, or email us days, evenings and weekends: info@CareCourses.com. We’re here to help!
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