Nerf Target Game

For Christmas, my 7-year-old got a couple smaller Nerf guns. Now, we already some, but they were all bigger guns (or Chewbacca's crossbow or Captain America's shield) so we played in a different way than target practice. But since these were smaller and I was tired of getting hit with little Nerf darts, I put together this simple target game. I grabbed a couple of the cardboard tubes we had lying around from paper towel rolls and toilet paper rolls. These make great bases. The hardest part was looking for balls that were the right size and density. If they were too small, they would fall right through the tube. If they were too big, they wouldn't sit on the tube. If they were too heavy, they wouldn't fall off when they were hit with the dart. Well, I was really looking for those balls that we used to have for a ball pit when my son was like 2, but I never did find those. Instead, we used some fake snowballs I had lying around. I think I bought them at dollar tree or someplace similar over a year ago. It turns out, they were perfect! So, I found book to set our tubes on. You could easily use a table. You just need the tubes to be set on a flat surface so that they don't just fall on their own. We put up the tubes and set the snowballs on top of them. Then, we started shooting! It easy enough to set up time and time again so after the first couple of times, my son was able to play by himself and was entertained for about half an hour just shooting the targets. It's easy enough, but you can make it more challenging by backing up and shooting from further away. It's a fun little game that's easy to set up and play inside when it's too cold to go outside! (The temperature the day we played this was around -2.)

"What Am I?" Guessing Game

If you've read any of my recent posts, you'll know that we recently took a very long road trip. And in an effort to save some money, I made a bunch of things to keep my 7yo son entertained while we spent so many hours in the car. One of those things is a little game that I made called "What Am I?" I took some photos of things VERY close up. Some of these things are easy to tell what they are while others are much more difficult! Some of them he had a real tough time figuring out what it was so I gave him some hints. If you want to download the PDF, there is a link at the bottom. And no worries, I included an Answer Key!

Click here for a downloadable PDF of "What Am I?"

Chalk Game: Target Practice

We got home from doing some errands one day and my son asks me, "Can we do something outside today?" Well, how do you say no to that? So, I came up with a couple fun things we could do while we were outside and one of them is a very simple, easy to play game.
Step 1: Use chalk to make yourself a target.
Step 2: Assign points to each circle to keep score.
Step 3: Throw bean bags at the target, trying to hit the center from a predetermined distance.
Step 4: The first person to get to a predetermined score wins! (We chose 30)

That's it. Have fun!