We've been having fun with word families and rhyming lately and I thought I'd step it up a bit with a holiday themed wall game. I love wall games. More importantly, so do the kids!
Here's a side view where you can see the brads sticking out from the surface of the poster board. We just barely pushed them through. Just enough that we could bend a portion of the back over and then we taped over the back to keep the brads standing proud.
I gave the kids a tag punch that I found in my craft supplies and let them go to town with some scrap paper and some white card stock. I then glued the pretty tags to the white ones to make them good and sturdy. Putting those strings on 60+ tags took the longest and, if I were to do this again, I would probably purchase pre-strung tags to save about an hours work.
I programmed the back (white) side of each tag with a word that matched the word endings that I put on the presents (also cut from scrap patterned paper).
I ended up with a bit over 60 tags for eight different endings. I hung them just above the poster with cup hooks. Those things come in handy all over the house.
Here you can see the game in progress. With three children, I expect it will take us a few days or maybe even longer to finish this game. I'll have them each take three turns a day for a while and see how that goes. They certainly had fun today!
The presents are a simple shape cut from patterned paper and then I drew just three lines to give them dimension. I used a bow shape to program the presents with the word endings. If we want to, we can change up the endings or even the purpose of this game by putting new bows on with numbers as answers to math problems on the tags, or really any kind of matching game you can think of!
Here you see a correct match being made . . . by Mommy! The kids were in bed when I took the photo, but I'll try and shoot a few of them playing tomorrow. :)
What a cute idea! Too easy for my oldest but my 6 and 3 year old would like it! Thanks for the idea!
ReplyDeleteThe hallmark of a good home-made game, I think, is extensibility. If I can't use it for more than one thing, I'm not going to make it. This is perfect for that. A well thought out game.
ReplyDeleteYou could also make picture cards of things that have the endings -- that way, instead of just matching letter combinations (they could look at the word sleep and see that it ends with the letters eep and just match the letters) they are matching ending sounds. If all they see is a picture of a child sleeping in bed, then they have to know that sleep ends with the eep sound and that the letters eep make the eep sound. Perhaps, as you go on, a truer way of measuring their ability to recoginze the ending sounds...
I also love that it is easy to make up new cards for this game. Once they've memorized all of the words you're using, you can check for learning by adding new words that they've not used before. And the new endings... a well thought out game, I say again.
Love you Sandie.