Sweet Bulletin Boards

I love December’s Sweet Reads theme and felt like this would be fun opportunity to do an interactive Bulletin Board with the Candy Land game as the star of the show!


I used the Game board die cut to create the spaces to land on, slicing and dicing with scissors and a glue stick to have them create a path to follow. Because it’s a bulletin board, and therefore the game is vertical, I used Velcro to allow the playing pieces to travel across the board. Each “Thing” has Velcro on the back and each Candy Land space has a small piece of Velcro above it.


I replaced the traditional characters of Candy Land with some favs from picture books: Pigeon as King Candy, Olivia as Grandma Nutt, Babymouse as Princess Lolly, Fancy Nancy as Queen Florentine, Pete the Cat as Lord Licorice, Scaredy Squirrel as Gloppy and Curious George as Plumpy. Piggy and Elephant are in place of the two kids holding hands at the starting line and I used Thing 1 and Thing 2, etc as playing pieces. I wanted more kids to be able to play so I doubled the number of playing pieces from 4 to 8.


The final task was creating the Candy Land Cards. I cut up a piece of White poster board into 3x2 inch pieces and used those color dot stickers that we no longer use on the spines of books, to create the deck of cards. There wasn’t a place to put them on the board so kids can ask at the desk for the cards, as noted on the game board itself.

I hope this inspires you to get create and do some fun interactive bulletin boards in the coming months!

- Michelle Johnson @ CEN

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe

We have done this game a few times at STE and each time it has been a hit with school aged kids/tweens.

I got the idea after seeing this video: https://youtu.be/X55rcKDlodo

This can be played one on one (or two on two). Players will stand behind the table opposite of each other but facing the trash can that they will be throwing their paper ball into. When a paper ball makes it into the trash can, they can put down an X or O. The first to get tic-tac-toe wins the game!

Tip: Let the players know that if they run out of paper balls, they can grab the paper balls on the ground that are behind them. Do not go to the other side of the table. That will only cause chaos.
The first time we tried it during ASZ, the kids did not want to play until my co-worker and I started playing that they decided they wanted to play. You may need to demo this so the kids will find it interesting.

Equipment:

• 1 Table
• 2 trash cans or 2 cardboard boxes
• Lots of crumpled up paper balls
• Paper X’s and O’s
• Masking Tape or Painter’s Tape (alteratly you can draw the lines with a marker)

(If you do not have any these items, it is easy to substitute with something else.)

-Nhu