Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Our Trivia Game

I come from a family of game players and have been anxiously awaiting playing games with my children.  But I hadn't found one that works for all the members of my family - something that would be fun for my husband and I but not too hard for the kids.

So, I made up on our Family Trivia Game.  I took the CandyLand board and cards, with only a slight modification: I taped two small pieces of card stock to the board over some of the character pictures.  These cards read:

             Yellow - Spelling                         Blue - Reading
             Red - Math                                  Orange - Bible
             Green - Extra                              Purple - Extra

We use different coins for our playing pieces.  On your turn, you draw a CandyLand color card.  Before you can move, you have to answer a question in the designated category.  The questions are made up by the other players.  For the green and purple, you draw a card from the Extra pile to determine the category.  These Extra cards include categories such as Opposites, Vocabulary, Music, Drama, Art, Science, Geography, Family, Friends, TV, Library Book, Clock, Calendar, Measuring, etc.

Since we make up the questions as we go along, it keeps the game truly dynamic.  We can taylor the questions to range in difficulty for our two year old on up to the adult players.  We can work on reviewing anything recently learned with the kids.  My husband and I try to stump each other or its fun to let the kids come up with the questions in each category.  One Sunday afternoon, the kids kept asking questions that had to do with our church lesson and we got to review it in game form.

When we play, we discard the specialty cards (like the Peppermint and Peanut Brittle, etc).  We also make regular cards equal a double and the double color cards equal triple so that we move the game along faster.  I also keep handy some paper and pencils for any writing/drawing etc necessary for questions as well as a few other tools - our spelling word list page to be used for spelling and reading, our practice clock, a US map for geography, etc.