Make Your Own Board Game

So, I was thinking about how many of our activities simply involve poster board and something to color with…

And I found posts here and here and here!

Anyway, our latest activity was to make our own board game out of poster board. We chose a dinosaur theme because we are currently obsessed with dinosaurs!

We used these little toy dinosaurs for the game pieces to move along the board.

Here is our game board! We did a dinosaur journey to the great valley, inspired by the Land Before Time movie that Gresham recently bought with his birthday money. (Aidan asked me the other day if I knew there are SEVEN Land Before Time movies, and could we buy the rest? I told him that yes I knew that, and that no, we didn’t need to purchase any more!!)

We labeled some spaces “question,” some spaces “hazard,” and some spaces “go again.” The rest are blank. On the question and hazard squares, the person draws a card from the appropriate pile. We made question cards with dinosaur facts and hazard cards that tell the person how many spaces to go back. (I thought it would have worked better to make the hazard cards more interesting, but Aidan wanted to draw all of the various hazards – like a hungry T-rex – on the game board and just have the cards tell the person how much to go backwards.)

This game board took us three days to create. (But we don’t have a lot of coloring stamina…) We definitely need more question cards before we play again, but everyone had fun. Great for a rainy day!

Another option would be to make the gameboard more generic, and then make stacks of question cards for all different subjects – animals, science topics like weather, alphabet letter sounds, etc. This would be a great homeschooling tool!

Linked to Works for Me Wednesday and Frugal Friday