Game: Color Hop

This is a very simple game my 4 year old and 2 year old like to play. I started playing it to help my 2 year old with his colors in a fun way and get a little exercise but my 4 year old also thinks it's fun. (I must admit, as an adult, I get bored of it a lot quicker!)

What You Need:
9 different colors of construction paper. (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, white and black is what we have.)
A piece of white paper.


The Set Up:
Set up the nine sheets of paper in a 3x3 grid on the floor.
Cut the white paper into 9 equal squares and draw on each one of the 9 colors.

What You Do:
Whoever is "It" has the stack of cards face down. "It" flips over the top card and calls out the color. The first player runs or jumps to stand on that color. Then just go it rounds so everybody playing gets a turn several times. No winners, it's just fun way to learn colors! We take turns being "It", switching whenever we get through the 9 colors once.

Games: Crazy Shapes

While Spiff and I were playing Crazy Eights the other night it occurred to me that it would be great to play it with shapes and colors as a fun way to commit those shapes to memory (and colors for Squidgee). I can't let an idea like that go, so of course I got to work. I made this printable deck of cards which he colored and we've already played about a dozen times. Most times I've lost, but who's counting? Oh yeah, Spiff.


The Printables:

red.

orange.

yellow.
green.
blue.
purple.

Here's how you play. Pretty much it's Crazy Eights, but here's the longer version:

The Set-Up:

• Shuffle the cards.
• Deal out 5 cards to each player, face down.
• Place the remainder of the cards face down in a pile between the players. This will be the Draw pile.
• Flip one card over from the Draw pile and set it up face up next to the pile. This will be the Discard pile.

The Play:

• Youngest player goes first, and play continues to each player clock-wise.
• On each turn the player plays a card from his hand on top of the Discard pile that matches the top card in either Shape or Color.
• If a player doesn't have a matching card, then the player draws from the Draw pile without playing a card and play continues to the next person.
• If a player has a Wild Card, he can play it any turn regardless of what's on top of the Discard pile. He gets to choose which color- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue or Purple (yeah, I know, I left out Indigo, I wonder when Spiff will notice.)- is to be played by the next player.

The Winner:

• Whoever plays all of the cards in their hand first is the winner. Hooray!

Did I miss anything? Let me know. It's apt to happen!

5 on Friday: Paper and Pencil Games

Here are a few great games to play out and about at a restaurant or in a waiting room. All you need is a pen and some paper. When I was a kid this was all my mother ever had in her purse (and if you were lucky, some Certs.) and usually the paper was a receipt or an old bill envelope (we got really excited if there wasn't a window in it. The little things!). Needless to say, we knew a lot of games you didn't need anything at all for, but that's a post for another day.

1. Tic-Tac-Toe:

I think it's safe bet everybody knows this game for two players, but it's a good oldie which is why everybody knows it.


What You Do:

You make a grid of 9 squares by drawing two lines across and two lines down. One player is X, the other is O. Take turns filling in one square at a time. The winner is the first to get three in a straight line, across, up-and-down or diagonally.

tip: When I had a hard time getting Spiff to practice his letters I used this game a lot, letting him choose whatever letter from the alphabet he wanted. He got a fun game and I got to feel like he was learning his letters. ;-) (Which he was!)


2. Hangman

This is one we used to play a lot in elementary school. It's a great way to practice spelling and any amount of people can play. We're not quite here yet in our house, but maybe you are!

What You Do:

Whoever is "It" picks a word or a phrase and draws a blank line for every letter. Like this: _ _ _ _
Then they draw a hangman's post (I feel morbid just saying that, but, hey, that's the game!). Looks sort of like a 1. The other player trying guessing which letters are in the word. A. No. Draw a head on your post. B. Yes. Fill in all the b's. (B_ _ _). So forth and so on until the players guess the word/phrase or you have a dead man on a stick. You can make the body as detailed or not as you want, just agree to it first. Whenever I played with little kids, I might add five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot just to give them a good chance, but usually it was a head, a body, two legs, two feet, two arms, two hands and a hat. I don't know why he had a hat. That's just how I was taught. ;-)



3. Squares (aka, Boxes, Dots and Boxes.)

This is one I've been playing a lot with my 4 year old Spiff. He really likes it. He's not very good at it yet, but he loves it, and it gives him good practice making some squares and helps him logic how to keep me from getting some. ;-)

What You Do:

Draw a grid of 16 dots, making it 4x4 dots. Two players take turns drawing lines up and down or across from one dot to a neighboring dot, trying to make squares. No diagonal lines, of course, then you don't have any squares but some rhombuses and triangles. When a player closes off a square by making the forth side they get to stick their initial in it. When all 9 squares have been made, count up each players squares. The player with the most wins.

Of course you can make even bigger grids if you want.



4. Heads and Bodies

This is another good game for little kids, and big ones too. And there's no winner or loser, just a fun collaborative art that will make you giggle.

What You Do:

Two or three (or maybe even four) players take turns drawing various body parts to make a whole person. Or animal. Or monster. We've come up with a few that really make us laugh, complete with floral bonnets and whoopie cushion shoes.

An alternative to this is to fold a piece of paper into thirds so it's three rectangles stacked on top of each other. One person gets to draw the head in the top rectangle. Another person the torso and arms. A third person the legs and feet. To really make it goofy, the players can hide their parts by folding them behind before giving it to the next artist.



5. Word Scramble

This is another we did a lot of in elementary school. It's really good for spelling and reading.

What You Do:

Pick a nice long word. Like, I don't know, pteranodon. Now all players try to list all the words (No places or names) they can find in that one word without using a letter more than once. You can put them in any order but the letters had all better be in the original word. Any word with three or more letters counts. So:

pteranodon

pet
nod
ran
dot
dart
dent
part
radon
pardon

You get the idea. The person with the most words wins.


Of all of these, the three very preschool friendly games are: Tic, Tac, Toe, Heads and Bodies, and Squares (or Dots or whatever you want to call it.). I am thrilled that we have finally reached a stage when we don't need to cart toys everywhere and can wait for our dinners with just the back of a placemat and the crayons provided.

Tangram Game

Here are two smaller sets you can share with a friend and a puzzle worksheet too. Challenge each other to see who can solve pattern worksheets first. Or play solitaire to see how quickly you can solve them on your own!

Game Sets:

Printable Puzzle Sheet:

Make Your Own Tangrams

When I was in elementary school we had two math classes. One was your typical (boring, if you asked me) adding, subtracting, short division then onto long division class. Boring, right? The other was a sort of applied math. I don't know if it was the teacher who made it fun or the math which did but we played a couple games to help build our daily math skills that I remember well. One of these was a dice game where, in your head, you had to add or multiply the numbers on the faces of 5 dice to get the answer. If you were right you got to collect that many unit cubes. Whichever team had the most cubes at the end of the class won. That was a great learning game I highly recommend! (and all you need is some dice- and cubes I guess, but pennies would do too!)

The other task I remember well is completing tangram puzzles. Tangrams are a set of shapes all related to each other in size that form a square when a whole. Separate they are a set of two large triangles, 1 medium triangle, 2 small, a square and a parallelogram. When you put them together you can form endless amounts of shapes and pictures. They really are a lot of fun. In my math class we had silhouettes printed on paper that we had to replicate using the tangram shapes. All of them. It's a mental work-out but it's fun and great for the brain.

My kid's been a sickie. It's winter. We're stuck in the house. I remembered: TANGRAMS! I dug around until I found the set my grandfather had gotten me. They were missing a piece. Then I realized, well, duh, I can make my own. So I did. And so can you!

Really, all you need to do is make a grid divided evenly into 16 units on some cardboard. Probably the easiest is the inch. Then divide and cut your square using the following pattern. Or you could just print up the one I made above on to some good old cardstock. That's really the easiest way. And they make a nice big set for little hands. The best thing about tangrams is they will travel neatly. Just stick them in a ziplock bag and throw it in your purse for restaurant waits. And if you lose one? So what, make some more.

Tangrams for everybody!



(and at some point I'll make some pattern sheets, but really if you google tangrams, I'm sure loads of pictures will show up for you to use.)

Printable Game: Match and Spell Booster

Just got around to making another page of words for the Match and Spell game from the previous post. Print, cut and play! And let me know how it goes, I'm curious and if something needs fixing the perfectionist in me wants to know!

The printable:

Printable Game: Match and Spell

This is a Spiff-Approved game I came up. It's kind of like Memory meets Polar Bear ABC (by the Cranium folk- if you don't have it, it's a good spelling game for the little ones!) and it's good for the age range that plays those. Just print up the printables on card stock and cut on the dotted lines.

To Play: Have your kid pick out a word card, then you pick out one that doesn't have any letters repeating from his. Lay the letter cards face-down on the table in a 4x4 grid. Then take turns picking up letters. If your letter is in your word, keep it, and go again. If it's not, put it back and the next player goes. First to spell their word, wins.

You can also use the word cards as flash cards.

I realize there's an E and no words with E in them. That's because I'm working on another set of words to go with these. :-)


The Letter Cards:


The Words: