Teddy Bear Race – Game for Toddlers

As all parents are well aware, many toys our toddlers receive as gifts or even we bought them, because, at the moment of purchase, we thought our toddlers would love it, end up at the corner of our home dumped and forgotten. Then, it’s up to parents to think of the games and fun things with those toys to make them interesting for their toddlers.

This is how this game was created. We had some plush teddy bears laying around and my little girl completely lost interest in them. So, last night I was looking at them and decided to throw a little race for our furry friends! It worked wonderfully! 😉 And my girl was asking for more! Well, it was surely a hit!

Let me show you what we did and how our plush bears became fun again!

Teddy Bear Race Rules

How teddy bears move across the race track? What you’ll need to have a teddy bear race? Well, not much really! You need 2 teddy bears, race tracks, and dice.

Rules of the race:

You put two bears at the start, each of the contestants takes turns in throwing a dice and bear move as many places as dice showed. The first bear to come to the finish line is the winner! 🙂

Note:

We used two teddy bears because only my girl and I were playing but you can have as many contestants as you wish! You just need to make more tracks!

Creating Race Tracks

A little bit of creativity… What we used for race tracks are puzzles from our alphabet foam playmat. We have placed purple puzzles as a start line and green as a finish line. And combined 2 different colors for each track (different than start or finish).

In case you don’t have a foam playmat, you can use one of following things:
– Cardboard box which is large enough to draw 10 – 15 squares for each of the track + start and finish line.
– If you have tiles in the house and enough place in that room to throw this kind of game, you can use those tiles! Just need to mark start and finish!
– You can use mask tape to create a tracks with square fields.

Adopting Dice for This Race

Ordinary dice will do but we had something different… 😉 I have created a large dice from the cardboard box I found (in the shape of the square), Just added on each side 1 – 5 flowers (some with smiley) and left the 6th side for “miss!”.

It’s really not hard at all, but you can use any of the dice you already have at home, just glue “miss” sign over the 6 dot side.

Although, big cubes are even more fun than standard little ones! 😉

Why is This Game Such a Hit with My Toddler?

There are several things my little girl loves about this game:

1st: She can choose which animals will compete! And we can have a somewhat different game each day!
2nd: She loves to throw big dice around the room! :)))
3rd: Well, she also loves to win! 😉

There are several things which toddlers learn with this type of game:

Sharing.
We share toys and we share the dice. For most toddlers sharing is hard. And they need to learn this so they can have good relations with their friends and other people.

Taking turns.
They are practicing and improving their patience span with taking turns. They have to wait. Something that is hard for all toddlers. They usually want things “now”.

Math.
Dice has 1 – 5 dots and this helps them recognize and count.

Winning / losing – all part of life.
From an early age, it’s important to teach kids not to get mad if they lose a game. It will most certainly improve their social life and get along with other kids.

We can throw a rabbit race, an elephant race, etc…
We can shuffle our plush animals over and over again!
What animals you will race?

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