Cam has recently mastered the art of playing Noughts and Crosses. It’s become our new game of choice at cafés while waiting for our meals to arrive. She has developed a plan of attack to win three in a row and when you don’t feel like’ letting her win’, she already knows how to block your moves.
With a new game added to her repertoire, I thought we could use Tic-Tac-Toe as a basis for playing with our books. Tic-Tac-Toe is a wonderful game for developing visual awareness, forward-thinking and strategies. In this case, it also allows us to play with some book characters differently.
We browsed our book collection trying to find some characters who like to play with each other.
We decided that Cranky Bear and Polar Bear would be perfect characters to use in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. They’re both looking for something in the story of The Very Hungry Bear (Cranky Bear wants fish to eat and Polar Bear needs to find a new home), and they both need to devise strategies to find what they’re looking for. Perfect.
Although Cam has become very proficient at drawing her own Tic-Tac-toe grid, I thought I’d create one that we could laminate and use over and over again.
I also created some Tic-Tac-Toe tokens using illustrations from The Very Hungry Bear and laminated them for durability.
We enjoyed a few games and even invited Dad to play along once he got home from work.
Once the novelty of the game wore off, Cam used the tokens to re-tell the story of The Very Hungry Bear. This game set will definitely get packed in our Out and About Games Bag though.
The Tic-Tac-Toe grid and tokens are available for download if you’d like to print and play with them. They are intended for home use only.
