Activities & Days Out / 20 July, 2019 / Nanny Anita

Indoor Balloon Tennis

British weather is so predictable in its unpredictability! It has been boiling for the past few weeks, but the moment the little ones break up for the holidays and can actually go out and enjoy doing lots of outdoor activities, it rains!  Typical!  Not that the rain really stopped us from going outside. We may have moved our picnic inside, but we still went out to do our own version of the Olympics (which is a whole different post).

Indoor balloon tennis, however, is great for when the weather has really turned nasty, and your little ones are going stir crazy and need to do something energetic.

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You will need:

• Paper plates
• Tape – like duck or masking tape
• Big craft sticks or ordinary sticks
• A balloon

Attach the craft stick to the back of the paper plates with tape.

Blow up the balloon.

Even though this uses a balloon, which does limit the damage, I would still move what you can out of the way. It will give them a nice big playing space, and keep breakable things out of the way of swinging arms.  This game can get very energetic and competitive.  We didn’t have any rules, but both EC and I were trying to really smash the balloon as hard as we could.  We did try taking our game outside to begin with, but the wind made it impossible to play, as we spent half our time chasing the balloon rather than hitting it.  I cannot put into words how much fun this game is, not just for children but for adults as well.  As soon as I told EC about the game he was desperate to play it, and asked me every 10 minutes, or so, if we could play it yet.  It was truly successful, and also a fun one to do with lots of children.

This activity may help development of:

• Gross motor skills
• Hand to eye coordination

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