Sometimes when you're out and about with children around, there's a lull in the action and the children get antsy and rambunctious. It happened recently at a birthday party we attended for our neighbors 5 yr old grand child. The kid was going crazy waiting for everyone to finish eating before he could have his cake and open presents. He would repeat to anyone, "we're opening presents when we're done eating, Are you done yet"? It wasn't really that annoying, in fact I thought it was cute. I felt sorry for the kid because it was basically an adults Memorial Day weekend BBQ, and he was the only kid there. At his grandparents house there were only minimal toys, and the one fun thing he liked was the Wii, but he wasn't allowed to play alone.
Anyway, I was done eating and we played a game to keep him occupied while everyone else finished eating. It's a simple concept and actually has some educational value, and it didn't require any props or anything other than our minds. It's just the alphabet game. We played the Animal Alphabet game, where I asked him to name an animal that started with A. He said ANT. Well, an ant is not an animal but we went with it. Anything that was alive and not a person, counted as an animal. Next he said BEAR, then for C he said snake. But we know that snake is S, so this was an opportunity to help him with sounding out C words and we went with CAT. Then DOG. He was having a tough time thinking of an E word, so a couple hints and he figured out ELEPHANT. F was FROG. G was GIRAFFE.
All the time during the game I asked him to tell me what the next letter was in the alphabet, so he had to start at the beginning and recite it to figure out what was next. This was a good exercise for the kid and he enjoyed showing off that he knew it. The toughest one to come up with something was the letter N, and we finally thought of NURSE SHARK after soliciting input from the others. I suppose we could have said NORTH AMERICAN SLOTH or something like that too. He totally lost interest around letter P, but after checking every ones progress with eating, he came back and we picked up there and finished. We went back to the beginning and named all the animals that he had picked and by then it was time for cake and presents.
So, if you ever need to occupy a young child, the Alphabet game is a great frugal game to play on the fly.