Play Hand-Clapping Games With Your Kids

Play Hand-Clapping Games With Your Kids

Several months ago, I went to Disney World with my extended family for a week. If you’ve ever been to Disney, you know that approximately 75 per cent of the experience revolves around waiting. A few days in, while standing a particularly long line, my 9-year-old niece turned to me and said, “Wanna play a game?” She then proceeded to teach me how to play a hand-clapping game called Concentration 64 that goes like this:

Why the 64? I have no idea. But I will say that it is harder than it looks to come up category items on the spot and even as an adult, hand-clapping games are still really freakin’ fun. By the time we got on the ride, our hands were red from all the clapping and we’d spent an hour laughing while everyone around us was bored.

I remembered playing other hand-clapping games as a kid, so I started doing a little searching to refresh my memory and arm myself with other games to teach her. I found this one — which is apparently called Tic-Tac-Toe — that was a favourite of mine as a kid. (I didn’t even know this had a name. Actually, I’m fairly sure we thought we made this one up.)

Anyway, this is the way we did it:

But it turns out there are more complicated versions of this with words and a variety of possible endings:

This one, called Slide, was another favourite among my friends, with the challenge being to see how high you can count before you screw it up:

And then there’s “A Sailor Went to Sea,” which I remember playing often with my mum (fair warning that this song is likely to get stuck in your head for the rest of the day):

Oh, and Down Down Baby was a mainstay, too:

Consider this your new (yet old-school), screen-free way to pass the time and work on that hand-eye coordination with your kids.


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