Animal Guess Box

Bubble loved this game, and has already made me promise that we will play it again tomorrow. The inspiration for it came from this recent post on House Of Baby Piranha about a fun way to spice up the song 'Old MacDonald Had A Farm', which the girls and I all thought was great fun!
The animals in the box got me thinking of ways to expand and teach Bubble some new concepts about animals and how they live, so we added some extra info to the outside of the box and turned it into a guessing game.

WE USED:

* small box
* blutac
* old business cards (or you could just cut paper to size)
* pens/textas/pencils
* toy animals small enough to fit inside the box. If you dont have any you could use pictures instead.

On the backs of some business cards I drew pictures to illustrate what each of the toy animals ate, where they lived, how many legs they had and what their tail looked like. You could use any characteristics though; the sounds they make, their colour, whether they have fur hair or feathers etc...

If you're not keen on drawing the pictures they can easily be googled and printed out, or cut from magazines instead.

Our animal food cards.

Animal tail cards.

Numeral cards to represent number of legs.

Pictures of where each animal lives.

Place a bit of blutac in the middle of each side of the box. Hide an animal inside without your child seeing (I just got Bubble to close her eyes and count to ten) and then you can add the appropriate clue cards to the outside.

Rotate the box slowly while your child tries to guess what animal is inside.
For example, point to each picture and say "What animal has 4 legs, lives in a paddock, eats grass and has a tail like this?"

When your child has guessed they can open the box and see what is inside. It doesnt matter if they dont get it right as they are still learning by association. If your child is finding it tricky you could offer extra clues, such as making the animal noise.
Other ideas: have a chart with pictures of all the animals to help jog your child's memory, or instead of a box you could place your cards in a mini photo album to make a guessing book instead. This would be a great way to create a portable game for travelling/when you're out and about.