Beach Games to Play at Home

Treasures in the Sand

• Young children love to sift through sand to search for buried treasure. Create a sand area out of a dish pan or large box filled with sand purchased from a hardware store. Hide five objects in the sand (such as a seashell, rock, small sand toy, crayon and rubber band) and draw pictures of the objects on index cards. Hand you child the cards and have him dig in the sand to find the objects, matching them to the cards as he goes. Keep adding new objects and cards as long as he stays interested.

Beach Bingo

• Make bingo cards by drawing nine sections on a piece of poster board. In each section, have children draw pictures of items associated with the beach (such as a shell, sun, toy, bucket, shovel, umbrella, towel, sunglasses, waves). Then draw the same pictures onto index cards. To play, pass out the bingo cards to each player. Shuffle the index cards and have one person call out the name of the item on the card as it's turned over. Tell the children to match the called objects to the ones on their playing cards by placing a shell or pebble onto the right sections. When a child gets three shells or pebbles in a row, diagonally, vertically or horizontally, he has bingo.

Fish, Fish, Shark

• Most children know how to play the traditional game of "Duck, Duck Goose." Give the game a beach theme by calling it "Fish, Fish, Shark." Gather the children and have them sit in a circle. Pick one child and have him walk around the circle tapping each child on the head, calling out "fish," until deciding to call out "shark" instead. When he does this, the tagged player must jump up and chase the tagger around the circle. If the tagger makes it around safely, he sits down where the other child was sitting. The other player now becomes the tagger and the game goes on. If the player doesn't make it around, he is the tagger again.

Under the Sea Movements

• Take a pretend trip to the bottom of the sea by having children do movements like the creatures who live there. For example, have the kids wiggle like a fish, walk slowly like a turtle, slide like an eel and walk like a crab. To do the crabwalk, sit on your bottom with your hands and feet flat on the floor. Raise your bottom and walk sideways in one direction and then switch to the other direction.

  Do the "fish pokey" following the same directions as the "hokey pokey": "Put your left fin in, take your left fin out, put your left fin in and shake it all about; you do the fish pokey and you turn yourself around; that's what it's all about." Continue singing and playing with other fish body parts, such as, "put your right gill in," "put your head in," and "put the whole fish in."