One Inch World

While playing we found out that our hangers from Ikea make excellent little marble tracks. Rebecca insisted on filling up the whole thing with my marble collection, good work for little fingers, also there was the challenge of keeping them from rolling where she didn’t want them as the floor isn’t flat..

We also had fun doing some wooden puzzles that I cut with our scroll saw. After Rebecca did them right side up she decided to give it a go upside down. They are small enough that it was a pretty easy job. So if you are bored of your puzzles, try them wrong side up. You could even draw a new picture on the back!

I was tired of the if-I-lose-I’m-not-going-to-play fight, so I needed a new game that you can’t loose. We have a bunch of cut up paintings for glueing, and I glued them in a random strongly connected network. You could draw circles or squares on a piece of paper and draw lines between them, or make them overlap. On our board there were lots of loops, thus lots of ways to get from here to there. (There are pictures inside the loops, but I would leave those out if I was drawing it again, they were just decoration, and distracting.) Get out two game people and another ‘goal’ marker, we used wooden beads and a triangle block. Place them randomly on the board. Each person gets to take turns rolling a die and moving that many spaces whichever direction they want. Whoever gets to the ‘goal’ marker first, the OTHER person gets to put it wherever they want on the board.

It took Rebecca a little while to get the hang of if she wanted to move the triangle, she had to let ME get there first. It’s sort of an anti-racing game. Good practice to break the I-must-get-there-first mentality.

Rebecca has played memory on the computer, but I wanted to introduce it in the ‘real’ world. So I drew these pictures if anyone else would like to make a simple game too. (There are only enough matches for a three year old.) I printed the file out, stuck a sticky laminating sheet on the top, and glued a thick scrap booking sheet on the back. The cards came out impressively sturdy, I guess it is the scrap booking paper. We had fun playing until Rebecca lost. We really really need to work more on loosing!