When we talk about balance with regards to our children most of us automatically think of things like our children walking on balance beams or the edges of flowerbeds. My 4 year old daughter has recently taken to walking around the house with a book on her head or walking around on her tip toes in a straight line and my 2 year old likes to try and balance her food in a bowl while climbing up onto the couch or into the car (not always successful I’m afraid).
While these may all seem like fun games that our children like to play, we tend to underestimate how importance balance is and how much it contributes to our lives every single day. Think about how many times you have to bend down to pick up something up in the middle of a parking lot while holding a wriggly toddler and 8 bags of shopping and trying not to get run over by a car (true story) or had to walk up a flight of stairs dodging toys along the way. On a far more basic level there is sitting on a chair without falling off, riding a bike or walking in a straight line. The reason why you can do these (and many other) things is because of a developed sense of balance.
So you can see that a sense of balance is there for so much more than simply balancing a book on your head. With all that in mind I decided to help my little ones develop their sense of balance with some fun egg and spoon races in the garden.
What you need for this game:
• Some eggs (I used a mix of rubber eggs and some dyed hard boiled eggs)
• Large spoons
• Other balls or objects to balance
• Empty toilet roll holders
We invited some friends round to join in the fun.
Once the children were done with their eggs we moved onto the balls and toilet rolls where they had to balance a ball on top of the toilet roll. It was a bit windy and the balls are very light so it was a bit trickier to keep them on the toilet rolls.
The children are all quite young and didn’t seem to want to race and balance at the same time so there wasn’t too much racing. On the plus side at least they were more interested in the balancing part!
Once they had enough they decided they wanted to eat the eggs instead.
Who can resist a purple hard boiled egg!
This was a fun game that the little ones really enjoyed. If you don’t have any eggs you can use any object really balanced on a spoon or a tube and if you have older children you could even try sack races or a three legged race.