Screen-Free Family Evening: 6 Missions for the Hour After Dinner

1. Rule Tunnel

The whole game happens in your hallway, or in the walk from the sofa to the front door.

a hallway. A sticky note and a pen at the end.

1. Line up at one end. Walk to the other end and back. That is the base run, and it is boring on purpose.
2. The youngest person adds the first rule. One instruction, applies to everybody. "Walk backwards."
3. Everyone runs it again with that rule in force.
4. Go round the family. Each person adds one rule on top of all the others. Rules stack and nothing ever comes off. Keep one hand on the wall. Hum the whole way. No stepping on the dark tiles. Say the name of a fruit at the halfway point.
5. Keep going until somebody breaks a rule. Count the rules that survived and shout the number.
6. Write that number on the sticky note and stick it at the end of the hallway. Next week you are beating it.

10 to 20 minutes.

three and four year olds give one-word rules and forget them by the fourth run, so have an adult repeat the whole rule list out loud before every go. Five to seven year olds can hold rules with two parts ("hop, then whisper") and will catch the adults cheating, which is the correct use of a seven year old.

2. The Full Cup

one plastic cup per person, water, a bath towel, the furniture you already own.

1. Build a course through one room. Under the table, round a chair, over a cushion, twice round the standing lamp. Say the route out loud once so everybody is running the same one.
2. Put the towel down anywhere the floor will not forgive you.
3. Fill every cup to two fingers from the top.
4. Everyone runs the course at the same time. Not one at a time, all of you, in the same room, cups in hand.
5. At the end, line the cups up and look at the water lines. The family score is the fullest cup, not the fastest runner.
6. Run it three times and beat your own score. Whoever finishes with the least water designs the course next time.

15 minutes, plus two minutes of mopping.

for three and four year olds, swap water for a ball balanced on a spoon and cut the course to four obstacles. Five to seven year olds can handle water and a fifth obstacle that has to be taken backwards.

3. Hum Tower

books, food containers, shoeboxes, tins, whatever is already on the shelves. A strip of tape.

1. Pick the target height: the top of the shortest person's head. Stand them by the build spot and mark it on the wall with tape.
2. From this moment, nobody speaks. Not one word. Point, hum, tap on things.
3. Build one tower together. Everyone passes pieces, everyone places pieces. When it falls, you keep humming and start again.
4. When the tower reaches the tape, the shortest person knocks it down. That rule is not up for discussion.
5. Then you may speak again.

20 to 30 minutes.

three and four year olds cannot go silent for twenty minutes and should not have to. Give them one emergency word they are allowed to shout once. Five to seven year olds police the silence harder than any adult, so make one of them the referee who hums a warning at anybody who talks.

4. The House Sport

one rolled-up sock, one piece of furniture, paper and a pen.

1. Choose the pitch. One room, door closed.
2. Choose the goal. One piece of furniture: the armchair, the laundry basket, the gap between the radiator and the wall.
3. Choose one weird rule. Take one from here or write your own: everybody has to sit down before they can score; you may only move sideways; the sock must touch the ceiling first; nobody may use hands two turns running; you have to say the name of the sport out loud before you throw.
4. Name the sport after the room. Kitchenball. Hallway Slam. The name is not optional.
5. Play in two mixed teams, one adult on each side. First to five points.
6. The winning team invents a victory dance. The losing team has to learn it, properly, all the way through.

20 to 30 minutes.

three and four year olds need the goal at chest height and exactly one rule. Five to seven year olds can hold two rules at once and usually want them written down, so give them the paper and let the rulebook become the main event.

5. Museum of Today

five objects from around the flat, five scraps of paper, a pen.

1. Set a timer for 90 seconds. Everyone runs and grabs one object that had something to do with today. The sock that went missing. A fork. The leaf that came home in a pocket.
2. Line the objects up on the table with space between them. That is the exhibition.
3. Each person writes a label for somebody else's object, never their own. Two lines: what it is, and why it mattered today. "Fork. In service at 18:40, during the broccoli negotiations."
4. Read the labels out in a museum voice. Hands behind the back, slow walk, straight face. Everybody tours the table.
5. Choose the object of the night by pointing at the same time on a count of three. It stays on the table until tomorrow.

20 minutes.

three and four year olds dictate their label and an adult writes it down word for word, including the parts that make no sense. Five to seven year olds write their own and start spelling things wrong on purpose the moment they work out that nobody is marking it.

6. One Flashlight

two blankets, three chairs, one flashlight or bike light. No phones. That is the whole premise of the evening.

1. Build a fort big enough to hold every person in the family, including the tallest one. That constraint is what turns it into a build.
2. Everybody gets in. Somebody will be folded in half. Correct.
3. Turn the room light off. The flashlight goes in the middle, pointed at the ceiling.
4. Whoever holds the flashlight tells thirty seconds of a story, then passes it on. It goes round until the story ends or somebody falls asleep.
5. Starters, if the fort goes quiet: the day something got broken and nobody owned up, the worst haircut in this family, what this house was like before the kids turned up.
6. The last person holding the flashlight decides how the story ends. No appeals.

25 to 40 minutes, and it runs straight into bedtime.

three and four year olds tell you what happened in the last hour and that absolutely counts as a story. Five to seven year olds do better handed a first sentence, so give them one and get out of the way.