Come Play With Me!

Come Play With Me!

On June 11, UNICEF celebrates the International Day of Play, and Lúdikos has prepared a variety of games for you and your family to enjoy special moments together. In cultivating this healthy habit by making play a part of your daily routine, you’ll see family bonds strengthened, and unforgettable emotional memories created.

1. Charades (Mime)

Charades stimulates various psychomotor skills, such as body awareness, motor coordination, spatial-temporal organization, rhythm, laterality, and balance. Additionally, it provides a fun opportunity to exercise creativity without using spoken language.

To play charades, prepare cards in advance with words or pictures that participants will need to act out. Place them in a box or container. Choose a player to start; they must pick a card and use gestures to represent what is described. The other participants will try to guess the word or image being acted out.

The cards can be organized into categories — such as professions, animals, objects, characters, and more — or mixed randomly, depending on the desired game dynamic.

2. Drawing on the Back

Prepare cards in advance with simple images such as a sun, cloud, tree, flower, house, star, circle, etc. Participants should form a line, all facing forward. Place the cards behind the line.

The last participant picks a card and draws the image shown on it using their finger on the back of the person in front of them. This gesture is passed along, person to person, always drawing on the back of the person ahead, until it reaches the first person in the line.

The first person, upon feeling the drawing on their back, must try to reproduce it on a sheet of paper, based on their interpretation. Then, the drawing is compared with the original image on the card.

After that, the person who drew on the paper goes to the end of the line, chooses a new card, and the activity begins again.

3. Spot the Difference

Choose a room in the house that contains several decorations or decorative objects. Allow the participants to observe the space carefully for 1 minute. Then, ask them to leave the room.

Discreetly change 7 elements in the room. You can move them around, remove them, or replace them with other objects. Invite the participants back in and challenge them to identify what has changed.

Repeat the activity as many times as you like, and in one of the rounds, let the child make the changes themselves, encouraging observation, memory, and creativity.

4. Red Light, Green Light – Traffic Light Version

For this activity, you’ll need three cards, each representing a traffic light color: green, yellow, and red. Explain to the participants that each color corresponds to a specific action:

• Green: Move your legs
• Yellow: Move your arms
• Red: Freeze like a statue

Show the cards one by one, and the participants must perform the action that matches the color displayed.

As the activity progresses, increase the speed at which the cards are shown to make the challenge more fun and dynamic!

5. Cotton Ball Challenge I

The goal of this activity is to transfer cotton balls from one container to another using a spoon. To set it up, place the containers about 4 meters apart.

Divide the participants into two teams and have each team form a line. At the starting signal, the first participant from each team must carry a cotton ball on a spoon to the container on the other side. If the cotton ball falls along the way, it must be picked up, placed back on the spoon, and the participant can continue.

6. Cotton Ball Challenge II

For this fun activity, you’ll need cotton balls and straws. Mark a starting point and a finish line about 2 meters apart.

Each participant receives a straw and a cotton ball. At the starting signal, everyone must blow through the straw to push the cotton ball toward the finish line.

The winner is the participant whose cotton ball crosses the finish line first!

7. RLC: (Right, Left, Center) This is a game created by Lúdikos

This dice game is fun, interactive, and fast-paced. It can be played with family or friends, making it an ideal group activity. The saying, “It’s not over until it’s over” fits perfectly here. In RLC, you can lose all your tokens in one round and still stay in the game. Everything can change in the next roll!

Distribute three tokens to each player. Take the 3 dice and roll them. Each face means:

• If you roll R (Right), you pass 1 token to the player on your right.
• If you roll L (Left), you pass 1 token to the player on your left.
• If you roll C (Center), you place 1 token in the center, and no one can take it back.
• If you roll a Star, you keep the token.

Example: You roll all three dice, and get an R, a star, and a C. That means you’ll give one token to the player on your right, place one in the center, and keep one for yourself. Then, it’s the next player’s turn.

On your next turn, you roll the number of dice corresponding to the number of tokens you have:
1 token = roll 1 die,
2 tokens = roll 2 dice,
3 or more tokens = roll 3 dice.

No one is ever eliminated, because you can always receive tokens from the players to your right or left.

The winner is the one who ends up with the last token(s).

Game Variation!
You can play this game using regular dice, with the following rules:

• If you roll a 1, pass 1 token to the player on your right.
• If you roll a 3, pass 1 token to the player on your left.
• If you roll a 5, place 1 token in the center — no one can take it back.
• If you roll a 2, 4, or 6, you keep the token.

Tokens can be replaced with beans or small paper balls.
You probably already know this, but just a reminder: Since the game involves small pieces, it's important to supervise younger children while playing.

Bonus Road Trip Game:

8. Horse Counting

This is a simple activity that gets everyone in the car involved in one shared goal: scoring the most points for their team.

Divide the car into teams. One team is the driver and the person sitting behind them, and the other is the front-seat passenger and the person sitting behind that passenger. If there’s a fifth person, they should join the driver’s team. After all, the driver needs to focus more on the road than on spotting horses. Alternatively, the driver can be excluded entirely to avoid distraction.

Whenever someone sees a horse, they must announce it to everyone. The first to call it out earns the point. If it’s a white horse, they must say “white horse.”

Scoring:

• 5 points for a white horse
• 1 point for any other color horse
• Horse being ridden: double points (e.g., a white horse being ridden = 10 points)
• Horse pulling a cart: triple points (e.g., a white horse pulling a cart = 15 points)

“Bury the Horses”:

When passing a cemetery on your team's side of the road, someone on your team must say, “Bury your horses.” If they do, the other team loses all their points. Only cemeteries on your side of the road count.

The front-seat team can only call it out if the cemetery is on the right side of the road.

Point Deduction:

If someone sees a herd of cattle — or as one of my teachers liked to say, “a barbecue plantation” — and mistakenly yells “horse” when there’s none, they lose 1 point for the false alarm.

Important Note:

Drivers, remember that your top priority is the safety of everyone in the car and others on the road. Keep your eyes on the road. It’s better to lose the game than your life. We take no responsibility for any accidents caused by playing this game.

Tips from Lúdikos:

• Participate together with your child, then invite neighbors, nieces, nephews, and friends to join you.
• The greatest prize is the whole family playing together, sharing good laughs, and having fun, so don’t give out prizes.
• Be moderate; teach your child how to win and lose, as this is part of life’s reality.

Roger Lüdcke
Roger has worked under Lúdikos is a Latin American organization and a partner of TeachBeyond Brasil that seeks to educate through recreation and relationships. Its leaders, Roger and Denise, offer courses and training in schools, churches, organizations, and colleges. For 18 years, they coordinated Acamp-Serra, a department of TeachBeyond Brasil. Roger and Denise live in Brazil where Roger is also Latin America Regional Informal Education Services Coordinator for TeachBeyond.