Fun Beach Games for Kids

Materials

• You can pack light to go to the beach and still be able to play some fun beach games with the kids. Bring a beach ball, a Nerf ball, a cup, and yourselves!

Games

• According to FamilyFun.Go.com, beach bowling is a kid favorite. Take your cup and fill it with moist sand, flip it over, and gently pull the cup off so the sand stays in the shape of the cup. Do this ten times so that the sand molds are in the shape of a triangle, just like at the bowling alley. Draw a line in the sand about eight feet from your sand-pins and that will be where the bowlers must stand behind. Each player will get to shoot the ball two times per turn and you can keep score in the sand. You'll have to remake the pins after every turn but once the sand is already there it isn't very difficult to repack it.

  The kids can also play beach darts. Draw a big circle in the sand and then three or four smaller ones inside it. Each area will have a different point value as in real darts. Using small stones or seashells, each kid will throw three "darts" per turn. Keep score in the sand.

  You can also play Pictionary in the sand. Form two teams or everyone can just guess what everyone else is drawing. Find a stick at the beach and have the kids take turns drawing pictures in the sand. Everyone else has to try to guess what is being drawn.

  If it is warm enough to swim, have the kids play monkey-in-the-middle with the beach ball. One kid stands in the middle and all of the other kids stand around him. Everyone throws the ball to one another and tries to keep it away from the monkey in the middle. The monkey can stand in the middle or close to the other kids to try to catch the ball. Once the kid in the middle gets the ball, the last person that touched it becomes the monkey.

  You can also play tic-tac-toe in the sand. Draw a grid with nine squares in it and have one person be X and the other O. Follow the normal rules of tic-tac-toe, where the first player with three in a row wins.

  With the Nerf ball the kids can play a game in the water called 500. One person is the thrower and the others are the catchers. The catchers should be at least waist-deep in the water. The thrower yells out a point value between 1 and 500 and throws the ball toward the catchers. The thrower tells the catchers if the ball is either alive or "dead or alive." If the thrower says the ball is alive, that means that points are only rewarded if the ball is actually caught without ever hitting the water, but if the ball can be dead or alive, then the points are rewarded if the ball is caught or if it is retrieved from the water. First player to score 500 points wins.