After School Crew - Week 4

After School Crew- Week 4

Game Cases

Overall- these could have worked out better. It was a cute concept, and a few of them turned out REALLY nice, but the craft took much longer than the time we had, and several of the kids needed more assistance than one adult was able to give. These may be better for slightly older children, or for an activity at an overnight (or longer than 1 hour) program. 

But... you live and learn. At the end, I'll include a few things I would have done differently.

 We started out with old DVD cases. We get a lot of these at the library, so it was cool to recycle everything. I cut out any obnoxious bumps ahead of time. Most of the plastic parts were fine, but if they were easy to take out, I removed them. The kids cut felt to fit in these cases and glued it to the inside.

I pre-cut the velcro into squares (3/4 inches). We bought an offbrand fastening tape that was front and back (in a roll). This was easy to use, as it stuck to the felt. We didn't need to glue the velcro down or anything, which sped things up a little. Each kid needs 32 squares of each color. It's easiest to put them down starting from the center to keep the squares straight. There should be 4 columns on each side of the case, with 8 rows that line up to each other.

I did have the kids figure this out with a little math (yes... I already knew how many they needed of each color. Shh). We counted (and then added) the number of columns (4 on each side) and rows (8) on the example, multiplied them, and divided by the number of colors (2).

We decorated paper for the cover of our cases (mine here is pretty simple, but there was a lot of coloring involved in the kids' projects). On the back, we drew a tic-tac-toe hashline. We used sticky back velcro on the case itself to fill in these spaces.

The buttons each got a tiny (VERY tiny) piece of velcro to stick on the back. We used the other side of the sticky back velcro for this part. Each kid needs two colors, with 12 buttons of each. We added two king pieces for each color as well (either drawing a crown with a sharpie, or using larger buttons of the same color). When the buttons aren't in play, they stick to the velcro on the edges. I had velcro along the sides of mine, but realized it wasn't necessary.

Things I would do differently:

• I would prepackage these into kits. It took a while for the kids to count out their velcro pieces, so if I were to do this again, I would separate sets with 32 squares of each color in individual baggies.

• I would pre-cut the felt. I thought it would be nice to let the kids pick any color they wanted out of the box of felt, but many of the children spent a very long time deciding, or changing their minds about what color they wanted (plus, it took a surprisingly long time for some of them to cut through the felt once they found it). In a re-do, I would cut felt to the proper size in a variety of colors for them to choose from. It would limit their options, but would speed things up considerably.
• While we're at it, I'd pre-cut the colored paper for the covers.  

• I would sort the buttons. I think the kids liked picking through the buttons to find matching ones for each 'team,' but this also took much longer than necessary. If I had them sorted (even very generally... light colors, dark colors, blue/green, red/orange, etc.) it would make things a little easier. 

• I would guard the sticky back velcro. We were a little low on this material, so it may not be as much of an issue for future groups. As I said, it only took a teeny-tiny bit of velcro on the back of each button. In the future, I would distribute these strips as needed so that it was divided up a little more fairly between kids.