I love Candyland as much as the next mama and SLP (we play it at least 5x, every night….), but if you’re looking for new (albeit last minute) game ideas, I’ve got some suggestions for the 2-4 year old crowd!
🎖️RACE TO THE TREASURE: Take turns in this cooperative game building a path to the treasure before the Ogres get there. Great for turn taking and visual motor skills, I have clients that ask to play this game every week.
📍 ZINGO: This game is fantastic for early vocabulary and sentence building. “I got the bat” “Not a match” are just a few of the sentences to practice. Your child learns to match pictures with this game, too. Too easy? Get the sight word version!
🐿️ SNEAKY SNACKY SQUIRREL: Practice color identification, labeling and matching with this game. It has squirrel tweezers too for fine motor skill practice.
🐧 THIN ICE: Need a game to support speech sound practice at home? This game is great for multiple repetitions (“Say a speech homework word before each turn.”) It also can reinforce color names and is so fun to watch a child’s excitement grow as the tissue stretches thinner!
Kids learn through play. Remember, sometimes we need to work up towards the full attention for a board game too. If your child isn’t immediately excited to play a new game, that’s OK! Sometimes, they just need a little practice to really understand what’s going on. And then, you’ll play it again and again and again and again 😉