Tell us your best games to play with children outdoors

I put together a fun garden obstacle course for my Son's football themed Birthday once - that was hit! I used different coloured cones to mark out 4 different lanes and had the kids running around obstacles, jumping into a paddling pool, hula hooping, spinning around a cone and then they had to dribble and shoot accurately on my garden FORZA football goal before the next one in their team set off. Fun, friendly and a little competitive!

even adults get quite hystrical playing it

Squidward - mine would love that so will try that this summer.

Had DD1 and DNi (niece?) making "perfume" with petals etc. at the weekend. Preferably involving litres and litres of water and eight million different sized receptacles!
Oh running through the sprinkler a big hit too.

Mine like bug hunting. They get very concerned about the insects in the garden and even had a small funeral for a dead one they found. Then we discovered it had actually been a leaf, but the good intent was there

'Hosepiping', which basically involves anything using the hosepipe. Filling up watering cans adn watering the plants/pouring it all out, me standing up ladder squirting them etc.

Poking stuff down drains is the other favourite chez nous. ds2 (2.5) announced this morning 'mummy, only small pine cones fit down the drains', which I feel is rather advanced reasoning for his age and down entirely to many hours of experimentation.

Swim suits or nothing on.

Empty plastic bottles filled with water.

Hide indoors (for the adults) with a glass of wine.

My ds loves boules. In France last year he made friends with a French man and they played it loads together. (While I sat and drank wine)

Boules is best - I like to beat my children at it !

DD, just turned 2, loves:
playing in the water (just a plastic tub filled with water and bath toys or even empty plastic bottles), any type of messy play (eg. Jelly in a tub), chalking on pavestones, digging up mud and stones etc, picking flowers and playing in sand.

If you have children that are a little bit older you can send them to find a four leaf clover...they'll be ages while you sit back and relax!

watering the plants.

Picking the strawberries/rasberries/redcurrants

Crab/ other animal races.
Draw start and finish lines (or use something to mark the line like a jumper). Children all have to be the same animal (crab, horse, dog, slug (!)etc) and have to move like that animal to the finish line. We have staggered starts for the younger ones.

Building tents with blankets/ clothes horses etc.

has NO ONE done the OLD french camping game with the two empty bottles?

ok you need
two empty plastic bottles
2 kids
a football

fill bottles with water( no lid)
postition a few metrew apart.
kids stand by one each

kid 1 rolls football towards kid 2s bottle. if it hits bottle then kid 2 has to get the ball BEFORE he can right his bottle and stop the water flowing out.

the winner is the person who keeps the fullest bottle

hours of fun

'Saving' woodlice by putting as many as possible in a bucket then giving them a 'wash' by drowning them all.

Swingball - we have family tournaments!

Mine love painting with water and watching it disapear.

Chalk drawings.

Hopscotch.

A washing up bowl of water to wash plastic dishes.

Swingball.

Running/scooter races.

Badminton.

Rounders-if we can get the grandparents and g.grandparents to join in

Buy a trampoline
Painting with water
Sand tray
Give them a tupperware container and tell them not to come back until they have caught creepy crawlies
Then sit back on your sun lounger and read book.

DS is three. We like:

Rolling down hills
Flying kites
Jumping on each other's shadows
Frisbee
Throw and catch with a bean bag/ ball/ hat
Playing chase where I can never quite catch DS
'You can't get past me' - DS's game - he tries to run past me and I stop him. Keeps him entertained for ages and I don't have to run much [lazy]
T ball/ golf - put small ball on a pile of grass clippings and whack it with a baseball bat/ golf club

Daisy chains/ Dandelion crowns
Dandelion clocks
Bubbles - even better with a bubble machine
Picnics
Foraging in hedgerows
Chalking on the sidewalk

Painting the fence with water and paintbrush- any size
Watering the flowers (dd (3.4) would do this all day!)
chalks
football
'hide and seek' ... but dd still thinks she is hidden if she puts her hands over her eyes...
sandpit
tent- we have a small 2 man and just have books and cushions in there... she loves it.
DS (4mo)just loves watching trees move in the breeze- quite therapeutic for mummy too!

More now because I got kicked off the PC

in the garden mine love paints, chalks and water to make art with either on the patio or on paper.

We have some pop up tents.these get filled with goodies (books, games etc) and the children live there for a few hours.

The best fun is usually with a giant cardboard box please it becomes so many different things over the space of a day.

We mostly play the 'leave them in garden playing in the mud game whilst I do the washing up etc' game. My boys have a good time digging and moving earth in the garden.

They also like the chunky chalks for drawing on the patio.

At the park they like to play catch and DS1 especially like to chase/be chased.

Any game that involves jumping on daddy is always a winner.

Ah. No. I forgot. We MUST play hide and seek with toddler and small child. For hours. Involving the same hiding place as the one you just used. Over and over again.

In our garden there is quite of lot of stick-age

stick collecting
stick piling
stick building
stick poking
stick eating
stick breaking
and of course the obligatory beating each other round the head with stick

quite a lot of 'only just avoiding windows while doing penalty shoot outs' too

swingball yes, for 5 minutes until the baby gets knocked out

cricket ditto

a certain amount of preventing toddler from eating lumps of bird poo

and bluebells in season

lately, quite a lot of watering sweetcorn and spinach

and an awful lot of trampolining.

Those are not games are they? I have fond memories of kick the can on the beach. I suspect though I too am of the benign neglect school of lazy parenting.

ours is usually involving a parachute, a hundred or so ball-pool balls and whatever sticks or canes they can find.
make teepee out of parachute, put bits of it on sticks and sit in it till it falls down
put balls in parachute and all hold an edge of the parachute
send all the balls to little sister who will try to catch all 100 of them (at once) failing to understand that two small hands are inadequate for this
spend quarter of an hour putting all the balls back on the parachute
crawling underneath the parachute which has balls on top of it, screeching with laughter when they fall off
trying some insane version of rounders where you try and hit a ball-thing about the size of a tennis ball with a stick . Lasts forever cos they cant do it
using the parachute laid out on the grass as a giant target and trying to throw as many balls as you can on to the yellow or red. A variation on this is child 1 trying to 'score' on blue areas at the same time as child 2 getting his on red and child 3 aiming for yellow. count number of balls on each colour to determine who wins

No insanity in my family