This is a great party game and can also be used to link in with a topic you’re looking at.  You need to use your fingers to feel inside a sock and guess what’s hidden inside.

Start with  a few old socks -we bought some  cheap men’s sports socks especially for the game. (They might get messy, depending on what you fill them with.)

Fill each sock with a different content. We used feathers, dry pasta, fir cones and jelly.

Each person has to put their hand into the sock (no peeping!) and see if they can tell what’s inside just by feeling.

You could give a sweet prize if they guess correctly, or if you have a few children playing you could work as two teams, with a prize for the team that gets the most correct answers.

You can vary the contents to fit with any theme or topic you like.

For Hallowe’en you might use cooked spaghetti (dragon’s intestines), green jelly (witch’s snot), peeled grapes (monster’s eye balls) or tomato ketchup (bat’s blood).

If you’ve been on a woodland walk you might fill each sock with conkers, acorns, fir cones, moss and so on.

Extend the game to nurture language skills

You can use this game to promote children’s language too.  Have one child feel inside the sock and describe the contents to others – see if the child can give enough clues so the others can guess what’s inside without seeing or even feeling it.

Or play the game and ask all the children to see how many words they can use to describe the contents – is it slimy, squashy, soft, slippery, gentle, hard, crunchy…?