Fruit salad DIY game

Fruit salad DIY game

Explore colorful fruit with this homemade game. You will need:

• A shoebox lid
• Felt fruit (Educatall online store)
• Small wooden matchsticks (Educatall online store)
• A hot glue gun
• A hole punch
• A marker

To begin, use the hole punch to make a hole in felt fruit pieces as shown.

Children will love adding the fruit to a bowl and pretending they are preparing a colorful fruit salad. Name the different types of fruit.

Use a marker to draw a line in the center of your overturned shoebox lid, placed vertically in front of you. This will divide your playing surface into two equal parts.

With your hot glue gun, deposit 6 large dots of glue in each half and insert a colorful matchstick in each one. Be sure to use matchsticks that correspond to the colors of your felt fruit. Apply a single glue dot at a time so you can hold a matchstick vertically in the center until the glue hardens.

In just a few minutes, you will have a colorful playing surface.

Children will enjoy associating your felt fruit with the colorful sticks, per their color. Show them how they can simply slide the fruit onto the matchsticks.

To turn this color association activity into a game, add colorful matchsticks to a tiny opaque bag, using colors that can be found on the playing surface you have created.

Invite children to take turns picking a matchstick out of the bag. Have them name the color of their matchstick.

Ideally, this game is for 2 players. Each child must fill one side of the playing surface. If, for example, a child picks a red matchstick, he can slide an apple or a strawberry over a red matchstick, on his side of the board. If all his red matchsticks have already been associated with a fruit, he skips his turn.

The first child who collects 6 fruit pieces wins.

If you have already enjoyed the activities suggested in the Pinch and create colorful chains article, you can use the colorful sticks you created with your new game too. Simply ask children to use the sticks as “recipes”.

They will have fun working together to find fruit pieces corresponding to the colors appearing on each stick, adding them to a bowl, and mixing them together.

Of course, you could also do the same thing using plastic fruits and vegetables.

These activities will help children build their language and color recognition skills while having fun!

Patricia-Ann Morrison