iSpy

After more snow, school delays and closings I'm sure a lot of you are thinking of ways to entertain the kids as we limp towards spring, I know I am. Cabin fever has set in and I'm desperately trying to find new ways to use old toys and new games to play inside as we wait for the snow to melt and the first spring flowers to pop their heads up through the hard soil and bloom. 

Yesterday I had D home and looking for something to do. At the moment he is big into the iSpy books and so as I tried to get a few chores done around the house (and get him to collect some of his toys up) I tasked him with making his own iSpy collection, first in green, then red, yellow and blue. He really liked this activity and as he had made such great collections I decided to take a few pictures and turn it into our own iSpy game.

You will need:

A collection of small toys/objects

Camera

Printer

Laminator (optional but I laminated our game cards so they will last longer)

Step 1

Have your child find objects for your iSpy, we chose to sort by color but you could choose any theme for this.

D collected green,

And red,

And yellow,

And blue,

Step 2

We played a few guessing games at this point, removing items and trying to guess what was missing. D found this quite difficult so then I started giving him clues as to what was missing.

Step 3

Next I took a few pictures of the collections to give him hints as to which items were missing.

Step 4

Before we tidied up all the objects I took photos of individual items within the collections. A few examples of these are below, I printed these smaller with a number of pictures on a page and a few written clues. 

For example,

"Protector of the castle, I like to wear red."

"I might be small but I drive fast, I'm the color of a lemon."

"I never wanted to be extinct, they call me blue-a-saurous."

Step 5

Finally, I laminated the printed pages to have them last longer and then punched a hole in the top corner and tied them together with some yarn. 

D was so excited to share his very own iSpy book with his siblings when they came home. This will be a great thing to grab on our way out to restaurants and doctors appointments in the future and it helped us fill a cold snowy March day.