We are lucky to live in a thriving home education community where members are active and play a great role in the community. We have reasonably regular project fairs that are always well attended and, last week, we had the latest one.
It was the board game fair, and if I’m honest, I nearly didn’t sign us up to this one. I wasn’t sure how to approach it with the children and wasn’t too sure how they’d take to it.
Over the Christmas period, I mentioned the idea and the older two decided that they’d like to make a game to take, so we did!
Designing the Games
We had a chat about what the games might look like. D decided he wanted to do something based on the How To Train Your Dragon series of books that he has fallen in love with, and based on this particular book he got for Christmas, decided to make some dragon-themed top trumps style cards.
Emma was less decided on what her game would be about, so we took to twinkl to look for some board game templates. There’s quite a few available, but she settled on this particular one. I printed a copy off for her and pretty much left her to it.
When she showed me what she had drawn, she had a fully thought out game idea and was ready to make it into a full-sized game.
Making the Game
For D’s top trumps game he hand-drew what he wanted his card to look like and I helped him to create a template on the laptop. HE then set about typing the information in for each dragon before printing them out and then illustrating them. He did a really good job at this and probably did it over five different sessions.
For E we printed the board game template onto two pieces of A4 paper and glued it onto card. She set about illustrating it all before we trimmed it down and covered it with contact film. We then trimmed it down and she designed some action card to go with the game. She typed these up and printed and illustrated them.
We also needed counters for her game and gems (it was called ‘Precious Stone Collecting’ so we got these and then made a box to store it all in. She also added some fabric pouches for players to collect their precious stones in as they went around.
The Day of the Fair
At the fair itself, there was a wide range of games. Each child placed their game onto a table and people were free to make their way around the hall to try out the other games. There were matching games, board games on the theme of Christmas, treasure and all manner of things. There was a football game (Subbuteo style) as well as the sock game that was a two-player game with items hid in a sock. One player spins the spinner and the player’s race to find the item the spinner indicates in the sock.
The range of games on display was fantastic and it was really lovely to see the ingenuity and designs, and of course, the children loved seeing their friends play their games!
excellent