After school activities for 6 boys

[BettyBottersBetterButter]

From September I will be CMing 6 boys after school 3 days a week & already starting to panic about the potential chaos if I don't have a bank of activities for wet days when the park/garden are out of bounds. I'll have two nearly 2 yr olds all day then collecting 4 school age (2 x 4yrs, a 6yr & an 8 yr old). Two are my own DC so have all the obvious cars, train track, lego etc but I do think with this number of children I will need to introduce some more organised & structured play. Any suggestions? Be good to hear how other CM's organise after school time when you have a number of different aged children. Thankfully 3 of them are TTO so it really is just the few hours between school pick-up at 3 and tea/home time at 5pm that I need to manage.

Just marking my place. Not a cm but look after friends DC occasionally and need some inspiration.

I have 6 of similar ages, but co-incidentally they are all girls. I tend to do some sort of planned activity with the youngest 2. The oldest 2 tend to head of up to dd1's room and chat/role play/colour in etc, the middle 2 tend to either join in with the younger children's activity or tag along with the big ones. It is pretty free flow. They are often exhausted after school and I like to just let them relax. This does mean that sometimes they choose to watch a film, or play on the wii.

I have also noticed that that many children together seem to take ages to eat, so you are not looking at much time at all really. For them to be ready to leave at 5 if you are feeding them first, tea will need to be at 4.30 latest. If you are not feeding them first, then they will probably need a decent snack when they come in from school, which would also take up a chunk of your time.

You could try some card/board games with the school aged ones. Mine like deadly 60 ruckus and Uno. One loves chess, but none of the others will play with her!

You could do crafty things, if the boys like it...? Make junk model robots/dinosaurs/monsters - they could paint them the following session?

DS is at a CM who often has 4 school age boys after school. They make BIG lego creations, play dens with cardboard boxes, get the train track out, maybe watch cartoons or CBBC, DS is generally teh latest to be picked up so he gets some time on teh wi after teh others have gone. But the Wi is used by all of them sometimes.