Make a Card Game

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A great way to have fun educating your children is to make a card game.

My children really enjoy a good game of TopTrumps. For those of you who haven’t heard of it – the rules are explained in Wikipedia. Even before they could read the cards my children would say things like “the one at the bottom – a 2 and a 0” They liked that they could play a ‘proper’ game, and I liked that they were using numbers a lot and deciding which number was the greater. But there is quite a limited range of the card decks for smaller children so we decided to make a card game of our own. And they loved it!!

The fun part of making a card game is choosing the pictures – you can search for images on google or from abc-kid. We usually just print them on paper, then cut them out and glue them onto old playing cards. The difficult part is collecting together the statistics needed. You could start with just three easy statistics per card – something that you could easily make up. Size, Speed, and Danger were initial favourites for us and we just marked them out of 10 (with, for example, a snail being the slowest so getting a 1, and cheetah being the fastest and getting 10). This can create a card game with an unbalanced set of cards, with some cards ALWAYS winning and others ALWAYS losing – but the children were so pleased at being able to play a game that they had made, that they never seemed to mind. Lately our decks have used 5 categories and we have done more internet research to find correct statistics (Age, weight and length for example, are usually easy to find).

Some games we have made include Wild Animals, Cars, Machines (trucks, bulldozers, aeroplanes and the Hubble telescope were included), Insects and Dog breeds (although Top Trumps have their own version of this now!).

More ways to make your own card games

1. Snap is easy and fun for smaller children – just make two or more cards the same.

2. Happy families – make 'families' of cards for each pack. How about the stages of animal development or landmarks within countries.

3. Pelmanism – this is the memory game where players turn over two cards and try to match them. A good educational variation on this game is to match two connected cards – capitals and country, French and English words, two paintings by the same painter – or whatever your homeschooling project is about!!

Happy Shuffling!!