The Great Mitten Race

Instructions

1. Have the kids remove their mittens and place them in a heap in the middle of a big room. Make sure that the mittens are mixed up.
2. Then have the children stand in a circle around the pile (about ten feet away).
3. At your signal, the players should race to locate their own mittens; the first child to find and don the right winter gear and shout "mitten match" wins.

Variations:

You can complicate matters by including hats or boots in the pile, too.

This is the game I got from Family Fun's website for our preschool activity today. I asked the boys if they wanted to have "The Great Mitten Race," a "science experiment," or make "shape monsters" and they picked the race, so they must have been in the mood to move. I thought it was a fun idea, especially considering our recent bout with the snow. So, we tried the game the way it was suggested...but it only took us about 30 seconds and I was left with two little boys staring at me like, "Ok, what do we do next Mom?" I was forced to speedy quick think of a way to successfully tweek the activity to accommodate two active boys -- or face the consequences. Hmm...something that could keep us going, in the burning off energy sort of way, for somewhere in the 15 minute range. Well, this is the result of the tweeking.  First, we added hats and scarves to the arsenal of...mittens...that we had to put on.  Then we got creative.  For our first round I said we had to put mittens on our toes, a scarf around our waist like a belt, and a hat on our knee.  For every subsequent round we each took turns being creative and SILLY. Silly is usually a big hit in our family. Anyway, some of our favorite rounds were:  

1. hats on feet, scarf on head, mittens on ears
2. a mitten in mouth, scarf over shoulder, hat tucked into pants
3. scarf on toes, hat under chin, mittens on head
4. hat, mittens and scarf all on your head

That last one was everyone's MOST favorite round.  For the rest of the day my youngest son walked around the house with a mitten on his head, covered by a hat, all tied on under his chin with a great big scarf.  He said it was his superhero helmet.  I wasn't exactly expecting that result from my creative tweeking, but I was perfectly happy to go with it.  And happy that the game turned out a success.