Day 132: Car Bingo 2

It's been five years since I last posted about Car Bingo, but yep, we are still playing it. All the kids love it, Grandma loves it when she visits, and even my parents got pulled into it before.
Today, we found a new addition to our growing collection. Our very first license plate bingo. Coqui already played on the way home from the store and was mad that he only found cars from our state. Well, we are going on a small road trip soon, so maybe he'll be more lucky then.

Day 68: The game of Carcassonne

We love board games in our family. It is a great teaching tool, and it provides quality family time.

So it should not surprise my readers that we have yet another games to share with you. It's name is Carcassonne by Rio Grande Games. This is a building game with 'small' tiles, almost like a puzzle that will look different each and every time. Carcassonne was a famous Roman medieval fortification in Southern France. In building with those tiles, one develops the area around Carcassonne and collects points in order to win the game. The players lay one tile each turn expanding the game area, building a landscape full of cities, roads, fields, and cloisters.

The Easter bunny just brought an addition to the basic game. The Inns and Cathedrals expansion adds a sixth player to the basic game. And it also lets you collect more points by adding a cathedral to the cities and an inn to a roads. The kids had lots of fun teaching this game to Opa (aka my Dad).

Day 19: Ticket To Ride

It was raining all day, as a matter of fact, the rain and wind are still going strong outside. What better way could we spend this day playing board games. Now we do play quite a bit, but I am always trying to squeeze in a little education. Lol. The kids are playing "Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries". I have gotten this game many years ago and taught Coqui to play over the past few months. Today, Peanut wanted to join in.

The game takes place in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. So we are learning Geography. Pronouncing the names can be a bit challenging, even for me. The players are to travel by train from city to city, taking a journey mostly over the countryside, but also through tunnels and with boats. They are doing so by collecting colorful wagons that add up to a train which is placed on the board and gains points. Once you complete an entire trip, you gain some more points.

It is a fun and easy game. The kids hear the foreign names over and over and learn where they are located on the map. Now it says that the game is targeted to ages 10-14, but really my five year old understood the purpose of the game and could follow along. It can take up to an hour though. So afterwards, we did some dancing to get the wiggles out.

The 'Yellow Car Game'

With the Hubby being home for the last six weeks, we got alot of family quality time. So when we went for a drive over the weekend, we played our 'Yellow Car Game'. I know, I got your interest now, haven't I!? Well, this Mama is very unwilling to have her kids grow up thinking, the only entertainment comes from electronics. Sorry. So we do NOT have a DVD player in the car - we have to come up with ways to make it fun without. And fun it is! - a simple act of being together as a family.

Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of cars in black, white, blue, and gray, and then there are just a few with 'brighter' colors? Well, yellow is pretty rare, though it has become more popular these days. For the kids, it sticks out and is pretty easy to find. So we play 'find the yellow cars'.

Now of course, there are some rules to this! One yellow car, jeep, pickup truck, etc... gets you ONE point, and one point only! One yellow hummer gets fifty points. Yep, you heard it right, 50 solid points. Then you get two points for a yellow school bus on off-days only! This means, driving Monday through Friday, they don't count - you will get one point deducted from your total for each bus called out mistakenly. Now when you call the yellow transportation vehicle out, you also have to tap the ceiling of the car - otherwise, it won't count! Here is the tricky part: commercial cars (and truck trailers) do NOT count! So if you call out a yellow taxi by accident (because the front looked like a normal yellow car), and you tapped the ceiling, then you need to subtract one point. Sorry. Also, only the person who calls it out FIRST will get the point.... that's why it can get so wild!

On the first drive, we got the following results:
Daddy - 68 points
Mami - 45 points
Coqui - 39 points
Peanut - 6 points (yep, she plays, too)

Now on the way back, it was even wilder:
Coqui - 102 points (he got a hummer and a bunch of school buses!)
Daddy - 97 points
Mami - 73 points
Peanut - 2 points (she was just tired and maybe even getting sick already)

Now if you add all those numbers together, we got to see quite a few yellow vehicles on our drive. (Tip: driving down the highway with lots of dealerships helps - they all have at least one yellow car on display.)
And yes, it can get pretty loud in the car doing this, but it's so much fun! The kids love it. It makes them look outside, trains their eyes, and keeps their minds sharp. It also helps with addition and subtraction.

Try it out, see what happens to your family. We laughed so much......

Car Bingo

We, as parents, have decided long ago that we will not have DVD players or such in the car. I grew up looking out the window while driving, and so can my kids!!!
So I have pulled out my old car bingos (and bought some new ones too a while ago!), and Coqui is now a passionate bingo player in the car. Not only is he interacting with me, but also looking out the window to find all the items in his bingo card. While we had our visitors riding in the car with us, we had almost a contest going on. It can become quiet funny....
And by now, he has remembered which sheet has which objects on it. So it is great for his memory as well.....