Organizing a Home School Field Day

April 29, 2016

I should begin by admitting that I have never worked by myself to put a field day together; ever! But I still think I'm qualified to help you put together a great field day because I have attended a few field days and worked in conjunction with other mothers to organize them.

We just attended a field day with our homeschool group and it wasn't very hard to put together with all the moms working together.

Our group leader secured a location for us; just a free public park with lots of room for us to spread out.

We plan a mid-week, mid- day event (April and May work best as long as school vacation are avoided). We ended up having the entire park to ourselves and the weather cooperated so nicely!

Each of the moms planned an event (a few moms teamed up to create an obstacle course) and brought all the supplies needed for whatever they planned.

Once we all arrived our group leader wrote up a list of names and ages for all the kids participating and then divided the large group (we had at least 25 kids show up!) into smaller groups to negotiate the different games. She also wrote down the events that were planned and decided which order would work to send the kids around best. Any games that needed to be set up ahead of time (like our obstacle course) were put together.

We often had two events going on at once; one for the big kids and one for the little kids and then they'd swap.

In between events the kids could play on the playground, have a drink, eat a snack or part of their lunch. We had one mom that offered to bring freezer pops and temporary tattoos for some relaxing fun.

We didn't have nearly as much down time as we thought though! We had so many wonderful events and the kids enjoyed them so much that they often asked to play another round!

Here are some of the events we had planned:

Tug of War-- The kids broke into teams and tried to get the other team to move or let go of the big long rope.
Three legged race-- Most of the kids had a great time trying to figure out how to walk together with one leg tied together.
Obstacle Course-- They had to crawl, jump, weave, throw balls into buckets, and run; it was so neat.
Balloon popping relay-- The kids broke into two teams; each child was given an inflated balloon and one at a time they had to run to the line, pop their balloon, and tag the next person in line. The first team to get all their balloons popped and back at the start won.
Egg and spoon relay-- Once again using two teams the first two children in each team were given spoons with the first child getting a fake egg. They had to run down to the swing set, circle around the posts and pass the egg off to the next person in line; without dropping their egg.
Water sponge/ bucket relay-- The kids were broken into two teams. They lined up behind a bowl of water filled with sponges. The first person in line took a wet sponge, ran to the table, and squeezed all the water out of their sponge into their team's cup, then ran back and tagged the next person in line; the first team to fill the cup won. We ended up finding out that the sponges held quite a bit of water so round two we switched to a bucket to fill instead of a cup.
Full/ Empty cup relay-- The kids stood in two lines; the first person had a full cup of water and everyone behind them had an empty cup. Slowly, they carefully held the cup over their heads and tried to empty all of their water into the cup of the person behind them. The team with the most water still in the cup at the end of the race won. This required a lot of communication and teamwork!
Negotiating a soccer ball around the cones and back.