Hopscotch Playmats Let Your Kids Enjoy a Traditional Active Game Indoors

Hopscotch indoors? Sure! Even when the weather's bad, kids can still go wild with an active game of hopscotch - it's a hopscotch rug to the rescue!

Kids still love the same active outdoor games that we used to play as children, but it's not always easy to find a safe place to play outdoors - or even if the weather will cooperate. What's a parent, caregiver or grandparent to do, to keep the little ones busy and let them work off all that extra energy on a cold or rainy day when the children are stuck indoors? Roll out a game of Hopscotch!

Easy to store, easy to carry, a hopscotch rug or play mat marked in the classic game pattern will give hours of fun for active kids and the healthy physical exercise that growing children need, while it helps them to learn all kinds of basic skills from balance and coordination to colors and counting and taking turns. Besides, hopscotch is just plain fun!

So the rules of hopscotch might have slipped your mind? No problem, here's an instructional video from a cute little hopscotch expert, to remind you of how the game goes and to demonstrate it so you can teach your kids how to play. It's easy!

In the wintertime, little ones (ages 3-4 and up recommended) can learn the game indoors - while they burn off some of that excess energy that can make stuck-at-home days a trial for tired parents! At the same time they learn important motor skills and counting skills, not to mention how to draw their own traditional hopscotch pattern for when spring comes and children's games go out into the great outdoors once again.

The little girls in our family (princesses in training, you'd think, to see them at play) are hugely in favor of anything from the pink aisle. We have some misgivings about the whole pink princess culture, but if a pink play mat will get their little bodies up and moving in healthy physical activity on a storm day, who are we to grinch about it?

In the old days, as kids, we used to throw a small stone on the hopscotch squares to play the game - but that was before hopscotch rugs were invented and we could only play outdoors on the sidewalk. Indoor hopscotch is a whole different story!

Obviously you don't want to have stones tossed around inside your house - but some kind of marker (also known as the "shooter") is needed to play the game.

If markers are not included with the hopscotch rug you choose, small bean bags are a wonderful choice. There are so many active games that kids of all ages can play with bean bags, when they're done with hopscotch, too!

I usually make my own pretty basic square bean bags with scraps of fabric left over from other sewing and craft projects - but if time is in short supply for you, here are some cute animal-shaped bean bags that would be a lot of fun for a hopscotch game.