Cross the River game
Cross the River game.
The “Cross the River” game has been one of the biggest hits for both my children during lockdown.
It’s an activity that we were given by my daughter’s pre-school and it is super easy, needs no real other equipment, can be adapted really easily and teaches the children lots of skills whilst they are having fun! What’s not to love!
So, what do you do? All you need is floor space (indoor or outdoor) and the children’s imagination. We used a blue rug for the river but you could use anything. I then told the smalls that they had to think of a way to cross the river. The rules are that they can only use one method of travel each way and they had to come up with a new way each time they cross. I thought my two might have a couple of goes and get bored but they kept on going and thought it was hilarious as they tried out different moves. They then ended up adapting it themselves by saying things like ‘Right lets try and cross as different animals now’. This activity really got them using their imaginations, they had to take it in turns, be resourceful, use their physical skills and support each other.
Here are a few ways you can adapt this activity to keep them engaged:
- Turn it into a competition! For those children who are really spurred on by a bit of friendly competition, you can see who can cross in the most different ways.
- Trying to cross as, as many kinds of animals as you can think of. You could then adapt this further by getting the other child to guess what animal they are. You could also get them to make the correlating animal sound or tell us a fact about that animal (e.g what they like to eat.).
- Different modes of transport. My son is car mad and loves any kind of transport. This one could be tricky for them to act out, but if you included getting them to make the sounds that match the vehicle this could be great fun!
- Having to answer a question to be able to cross. For younger children we have done things like ‘Cross the River if you have brown hair/blue eyes/ are a girl etc. For older children you could make it a bit more of a quiz and they have to guess the answer correctly to be able to cross. This would work well with making it a competition.
- Pretending that there are crocodiles in the river, getting them to move a bit faster and think of different ways to get past the crocodile.
Cover photo by By Monkey Business Images on Canva
