Shut the Box Dice Game

I’d love to claim this idea as my own, after all its simplicity is brilliant and what it teaches is incredibly useful. But, alas, this game is not my brainchild. Disney’s FamilyFun magazine shared this idea in the November 2011 issue. My take on it follows.

Shut the Box is a great dice game that gets children thinking about different combinations of numbers that can be added to equal a sum.

Supplies:

Cardstock

Nine 3” x 4” toploading trading card sleeves (optional)

2 dice

Pencil and paper for score keeping

I designed a PDF of cards with each of the numbers 1-9 on them and printed the pages on cardstock. I flipped the pages over and printed Shut the Box graphics on the back so the cards would be double-sided. Then I cut out the cards and slid them into some trading card sleeves (while the sleeves are unnecessary, they make the cards more durable; lamination would serve the same purpose).

Then, I laid the cards out in order with the numbers face up on the table and handed my son two dice. He rolled the dice and added the two numbers together. Then it was up to my son to decide what two combination of numbers (that would add up to the sum) to flip over.

If he rolled a six and one, he added the numbers to get a sum of seven. He could flip over any two cards with numbers that added up to seven; for example, three and four, five and two, etc. Once the two cards were flipped (showing the Shut the Box graphic), he rolled the two dice again, continuing to flip over cards until he rolled a sum that could not be made with the existing cards. Play stopped and the remaining numbers were added together for his round 1 score.

Now it was my turn. We flipped over the cards so all the numbers were face up. I played until the sum I rolled could not be made with the remaining cards, added the numbers face-up, and we determined who won round 1. (He had a lower score than me.) We played three rounds and have played several times since that day.

We have yet to Shut the Box (getting ALL the cards turned over in one round). It sure is fun trying, though!

Click here for a 3-page PDF of the Shut the Box cards I made. Print pages 1-2; flip the pages over and print two copies of page 3 on the backs.

Snappy the Syllable Turtle [Board Game]

Now that my son has banged out some funky beats on his syllable drum, I thought he’d enjoy playing a syllable board game.

After seeing the most adorable snapping alligators people were making and sharing on the Internet (find one example here), I thought I’d try my hand at making a snapping turtle.

We affectionately named him Snappy.

How to Make a Snapping Syllable Turtle

Salvage some corrugated cardboard from your recycling bin (I used an empty box of diapers). You only need a small piece. Fold it in half and draw a turtle shape with the rear of the turtle shell on the fold. My turtle was nothing more than an oval with a smaller circle peeking out from one end. Cut it out.

Next glue two metal bottle caps on each side of the turtle inside so that when you pinch the turtle together it makes a snapping sound. I used super glue and held the caps in place with rubber bands until the glue had dried.

Next, decorate your turtle however you desire. My son painted his in a combination of greens and brown. I used a hair dryer to speed up the drying time and then added some details to the shell with a permanent marker; lastly, my son glued on some googly eyes.

Read

While this activity is really about word work, I wanted to sneak in some science. We read two books to learn about turtles, one of the most interesting amphibians. I read the first book. My son read the second.

Play the Board Game

Download and print the game board (pictured below) and playing cards I made here.

Use something small as chips to move around the board (we used two different colored buttons). This two-player game is easy. Each player draws one card when it’s their turn, reads the word, and uses Snappy to snap the number of syllables in the word. Then they move their chip the same number as the syllables they counted. Play continues until one player finally reaches the finish and successfully helps Snappy return to his home in the lake.

Snapping the syllables with our homemade snapping turtle was so much fun for my son, he often did it for me when it was my turn!

Making a Picasso-inspired Guitar

To teach my son about Pablo Picasso, I decided not to focus on his role in the cubism movement, but rather on his remarkable painting The Old Guitarist. 

Since our last fine art lesson (on Van Gogh) taught us about the connection between color and emotion, this piece from Picasso's Blue Period was a nice segue.

To start, I gave my son a coloring page that I’d made based on the painting and asked him to follow the directions at the top of the page, considering what the man might be feeling/thinking and using colors to reflect that. (Download the coloring page I made here.)

Kids have THE best interpretations of art. My son thought the old man was thinking about his boy and imagining the two guitars he was going to make for him; that’s why his eyes were closed! The old man was excited about the project. I asked my son what color would show his excitement and he selected green.

When he was done coloring, we figured out how many years ago the original painting was made. Then, I showed him a print-out of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and shared the following:

• For three years between 1901 and 1904, Pablo Picasso used mostly blue in his paintings. I asked, “Why do you think he used so much blue?” He was sad.
• When a close friend of Pablo’s died, he painted LOTS of sad things like people who had no friends or money or were sick.
• The Old Guitarist is a painting of an old blind man who has no money.

Then, my son made his own guitar.

Here’s the supply list: an empty tissue box, a paper towel tube, brown postal mailing paper, six rubberbands, a small piece of cardboard, and six brads. I traced the sides of the box onto the brown paper and my son cut them out. Then we glued them to the box (1).

Next I cut out a circle at the top of the box where the guitar’s neck would be attached (2). I used a glue gun to apply glue on the circle’s edge and we wedged the tube tightly in the cut-out hole (3). Then my son cut two slits in the top of the tube opposite each other (4) and we slid a trapezoid-shaped flat piece of cardboard into the slits. I applied a little glue to hold it in place.

My son added six rubberbands to the base of the guitar (5) and slid the brads into the cardboard edges of the trapezoid top (6).

When the guitar was made, I showed my son the two pictures of The Old Guitarist – his and Picasso’s. I asked him what kind of music he thought the two men were playing (was it fast or slow?) and had my son play his instrument the way they might.

When we were done, my son didn’t put his new guitar down for a whole hour. He even held it while watching a movie we rented. Maybe I’ve got a budding musician on my hands!

Unlocking the Keys to Simple Addition

Math might come pretty easily to my son but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need the practice. There are two main principles that guided the creation of this activity; I wanted:

• to make a math game that could be changed with more difficult problems as my son’s proficiency grows.
• a way that he could check his answers independently.

The result was Lock-and-Key Math.

You need 4 supplies for this activity:

Cardstock (print my 4-page PDF on it)

Thirteen 3” x 4” toploading trading card sleeves

Lamination

dry-erase marker

Cut out the gray key silhouettes. Cut out each of the keys (yes, it’s a pain, but TOTALLY worth it). Take the keys to an office/copy shop to be laminated. Use thick lamination sheets and space the keys widely. Once laminated, line up the keys with each corresponding silhouette, using them as a guide for where to cut the lamination so the final result is a rectangle shape with the key floating inside it.

Put the silhouettes (or locks) inside the thirteen trading-card sleeves. Add addition problems to the keys with a fine-tip dry-erase marker. On the back of each key’s corresponding lock, write the answer on the sleeve with the marker.

Before my son played the Lock-and-Key Math game, we read Loreen Leedy’s Mission Addition. (I love Leedy’s books.) Because the book explains how to add numbers when they are stacked vertically (as opposed to 3 + 4 =), all the Lock-and-Key problems were written that way.

It’s time to play!

I put all the keys is a jumbled pile on the table and laid the locks face-down so the answers were visible. One by one my son picked a key, solved the addition problem, and found the sleeve with the answer. Then he flipped over the sleeve and slid the key into the lock. If he was right, the silhouette matched the key perfectly.

My son patiently and quietly worked through all 13 problems, matching each key to its respective lock. While I planned for him to play the game independently, I failed to consider how excited he’d be with each correct match!

Keyboard Codes (Spelling Practice with a Homemade Laptop)

My son LOVES the computer, so I’m constantly in search of great online (educational) games for him to play. When I saw Joyful Mama’s post on the felt laptop she made for her daughter, Sweatpea, it jumpstarted my creative juices.

Since we’re still working on spelling those word-wall words my son is bringing home from school (check out Roll & Write for some history on that), I thought a DIY laptop would be perfect!

I knew, though, that if I put a pretend laptop in front of my son and asked him to type the words he would lose interest quickly. To prevent that from happening, I created ciphers (each was a sight word from school) for him to decode using the keyboard. This was SO MUCH fun!

1. Make a DIY Laptop

Use a large flat, rectangular piece of corrugated cardboard (mine was the packaging that came with a 16x20 picture frame I bought recently). Score in the middle so you can fold your laptop. Cut the holes off of an 8 ½ x 11 plastic sheet protector. Use a glue gun to adhere the sleeve above the fold for your laptop’s monitor.

Download and print the keyboard I made (click here). Glue it to your cardboard laptop below the fold. If you want, draw a rectangle below the spacebar for a touchpad.

Next cut another piece of cardboard to make a kickstand to keep your laptop’s monitor from flopping over. Attach to the back of the “monitor” using a glue gun.

2. Read

I love to pair a great book with every activity, so for this one we read Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. It's hilarious!

3. Help Your Child Decipher Keyboard Codes

Pages 2-4 of the keyboard download have sight-word keyboard codes. Give one of these pages to your child along with the laptop.

The two-digit codes are numerical with the first number indicating the row and the second number representing the number of keys in that row that a child will count (from the left). For example, if the code is 33, a child will count down three rows and over three keys; hence, the letter is D.

4. Have Them Type the Sight Words

This was a lot of word work for my son. Once he completed decoding all 12 words from the first worksheet, I told him to find one 2-letter, 3-letter, and 4-letter word and circle each. Then I slipped his completed keyboard codes paper into the monitor’s plastic sleeve and he typed each of those three words.

When this was done, my son had loads of fun playing with his new “toy.” Since I had all the supplies for this activity on hand, I have no doubt that this is the cheapest computer I will ever buy him.