Children's Learning Activities: Go Fish

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This blog is here for you to find fun learning activities to do with your children. We share great ideas we find and love on the Internet, as well as ideas we come up with on our own! We also like to share resources we find helpful.

To find ideas for your child, click on the age range blog label or on the theme/topic you are looking for (on the left side of the page). In each post, we try to list optimal age ranges for the activity, but you must judge for yourself if it is appropriate for your child. When you try an activity out, please comment and let us (and everyone else) know how your child liked it!

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Go Fish

Age Range: 2+ years (the big requirement is to recognize numbers 1-10)

Materials: Deck of cards, preferably one made for kids

Activity:

Shuffle deck, deal cards one at a time to each player until each has 5 cards
Place the rest of the deck face down in the center
You (player 1) ask your child "Can I have a five?" (or whatever other card you are holding)Your child (player 2) responds with either "yes" and hands over the card if he/she has it or "No, Go fish!" if he/she does not have it.
If you are told to "Go fish" you must draw the top card from the stack. If the drawn card matches three cards of a value you already hold, you can lay down the four cards and continue. Otherwise it's player 2's turn.

*A variation we do of the game that makes things easier for a 2 year old to play is we only require two cards of the same kind to lay them down as a matched set. This allows the game to move a bit faster at first and encourages simple matching of like numbers.

*We also kept our cards and Tobias' cards visible for the first 2 games until he understood how to play. Then we started hiding our cards but kept his cards visible so we could help him. Once he gets a bit better he can hide his cards as well and we'll play as normal.