Life-Size Maze

Turn your play room into a maze!  Even better, turn your whole house into a maze!  Mazes do wonderful things for your child's development, and actually building a maze pays off in even more ways!

Here's a few benefits from playing with mazes:

• Mazes can enhance your child's spacial awareness and perception.
• Solving mazes can improve your child's confidence and patience.
• Focusing on mazes can sharpen your child's memory.
• Concentrating on mazes can strengthen your child's problem-solving skills.
• While paper mazes may increase your child's eye-hand and small muscle coordination, this life-size maze uses their large-muscles too!
• Actually helping build the maze demands fun, new workouts from their quickly growing cognitive skills!

Making a Life-Size Maze
The supplies are simple--you can use books, jump-ropes, yarn, blankets, or anything else to create maze-like barriers.  You can identify the safe path in your mind or actually build it first.  Then add a few distracting paths.  Let your children help!  Even though they helped build this, my kids loved going through it.  I put some gold "pirate" coins at the end as a treasure and they were thrilled to "go on a hunt" through the maze.  After they knew the route, my preschoolers enjoyed taking my younger children though the maze so they could get their gold too, and then retracing their exact steps.  "Now, how did I get here?" and "Let's see if we can get out of this," were phrases I heard several times! 

Next time, I want to find a way to make walls they can't see over.  It will add a whole new dimension to the maze! 



I may share at any of these parties!