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Does anybody know of any good ideas for activities that would keep a large group occupied for several hours?
This includes ideas for older children, younger children, visual and interactive. All advice welcome.
Waterfun – sprinklers, hoses, water balloons water fights etc. Most kids love it and can play with water for hours in the summer. You can do twists – like playing limbo with a hose, or Red Rover through a sprinkler, or putting a sprinkler under a trampoline. I don’t know where you live, though, and what water restrictions are like.
depends what age and gender. but sports, hiking, some learning, arts/crafts, board games, etc are good general categories.
Another idea is if its older kids – like fifth, sixth and seventh graders – you can teach them the “Cup dance” (check Maccabeats Dror Yikra). It’s really fun. I once taught it to a group of fifth graders and they were obsessed – we spent an hour on it and they were doing it the whole week! Sounds weird but if you know it, it really is hard to stop once you start:)
A Talent Show is also a fun idea
You must be careful with talent shows. There are always a few talented kids, but for every kid with talent, there are two who don’t. Please don’t let the kids who don’t shine in any particular avenue feel inferior.
My best tip I ever got (first as a substitute Bnos leader, then as a camp counselor for far too many years) is that, if you have elementary school aged kids, you should do an activity with them THAT THEY DO NOT YET KNOW. Teach them something new and cool. This will hold their attention.
Do they all have to be together? See if you can divide at all.
Maybe try a full-motion game like Coke and Pepsi (I did it with kids and we kept on making up new rules- it was a lot of fun and took up a lot of time 🙂 ). Remember, your object here is to take up time.
This seems like a Tisha B’av camp- if not (or if the kids are young enough and you don’t mind) food decorating can be great. If you have little kids, the weirdest tip I got was to make smoothies with them. And it worked- they loved watching the blender go and all loved drinking them after.
My one and only Tisha B’av camp, the kids decorated hats. And picture frames. And pictures for the frames. You can’t go wrong. Someone will always finish in five seconds, so you tell them that it looks gorgeous and make them feel like an artist and then shove another paper in their face and tell them to make another one to hang up on their wall.
If they’re young enough, they might like the Morah Music type tapes. You won’t, though. They get stuck in your head like you wouldn’t believe. I still know the Hokey Pokey in three languages.
For older kids, Freeze and Justify, Charades or some other kind of acting game can be fun.
Good luck!
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