Fun Indoor Children's Games

Use Your Imagination

• Children enjoy imitating the world around them. Acting games allow children to use a combination of mind and body skills to build their confidence. Use props around the home to engage children in role-play. Whether you reenact scenes at the post office, grocery store, restaurant or hotel, creativity can flourish.

  Practice mime, using gestures without words, providing clues for participants to guess. Children can take turns demonstrating different scenarios like climbing a tree, answering the telephone or visiting the dentist.

  Incorporate acting with rhyming. Split players into two groups of audience and actors. The audience thinks of a one-syllable, secret word but only tells the actors a word that rhymes with it. The actors have to act out a succession of rhyming words until the audience reveals that they have acted out the secret word.

Use Your Body

• Active games promote endurance, agility, coordination and strength. Reorganize an indoor space for a makeshift gym, game field or stage. This kind of friendly competition encourages exercise, while promoting patience and good sportsmanship.

  Hold your own Olympic games. Feature events such as obstacle courses, ring toss, crawling, hoping, skipping, slithering and jumping races. Balloons are useful for indoor sporting events, such as slow-motion basketball and javelin throwing with long balloons. Balance balloons with the head, hands and feet. Hold a triathlon combining three of the events. An egg timer is handy when holding sporting events.

  Children who love expressing themselves may enjoy the opportunity to spotlight their skills at a talent show. Performers can sing, dance, play instruments, tell jokes and stories, make silly noise or faces or display gymnastics feats. You could also select judges and issue awards.

Use Your Intelligence

• Games that involve problem-solving and strategic thinking help children learn the joy of exercising their brains.

  A game of treasure hunt can incorporate the use of maps and obstacles. Playing detective by hunting for clues and finding evidence helps develop critical thinking skills. Word games are also enriching: Use magnets, alphabet blocks or magazine cuttings to create words, sentences and stories.

  Visualization games enhance memory. Place a number of objects on a tray. Players try to remember as many items as possible. The items are then covered, and players recount all the objects they can remember. Alternatively, place all the objects in a sack so players can guess what they can feel.

  Test skills of observation in a game of "what's different." Players study the appearance of one individual who then leaves the room and changes something. Players then guess what has changed.