Did you enjoy playing Dominoes as a child? Or maybe you used to like toppling the first domino and watching the entire stack come down!
Dominoes is not only a fun game, it's one of those rare old-school games that is still popular in today's toy market. This is because it offers several benefits for children, can be played anywhere, and is just as much fun for adults!
So what if we told you that you could make your own game of Dominoes at home?
This week’s Co-Create activity is one awesome shumee mom’s interpretation of the classic game. Read on to find out how you can create a set of colourful and exciting dominoes that your child will love!
Benefits of the Visual Discrimination Dominoes
This week’s activity is once again brought to you by Anushikha Bansal, a DIY blogger and homeschooling mom to 3-year-old Atharv. You can see Anushikha’s previous activity, Spatial Awareness Grid, here.
This game is called Visual Discrimination Dominoes. Making these dominoes can be a lovely arts and crafts activity for your child and playing with it offers several benefits. Some of these include:
1. Concentration - Your child will have to focus and patiently play the game to find all the perfect matches. This will help them get comfortable concentrating for longer periods of time.
2. Spatial awareness - Placing the right dominoes next to each other and building a whole chain will sharpen their sense of spatial awareness.
3. Colour recognition - Identifying the colours is the first step to joining the dominoes. Playing this game will help them learn the names of different colours.
4. Fine motor ability - Manipulating the small pieces of cardboard will develop your child’s fine motor skills.
5. Hand-eye coordination - Moving the dominoes and placing them in precise spots will hone their hand-eye coordination.
6. Problem solving skills - Playing with dominoes requires your child to put on their thinking cap and use simple strategy and planning to form a chain. This will sharpen their problem solving skills.
7. Visual discrimination - Telling the colours apart to find the right matches will hone their visual discrimination skills.
8. Sense of accomplishment - Completing a game of dominoes on their own will assure your child about their cognitive abilities and give them a confidence boost!
Creating the Visual Discrimination Dominoes
Age group:
This activity can be enjoyed by children between 2.5 to 5 years.
Material required:
1. A piece of cardboard
2. Cardboard cutter/scissors
3. Colouring pens or markers
How to create the Dominoes:
1. Take the piece of cardboard and cut it into several small rectangular pieces.
2. Use coloured markers to make the patterns shown in the above image.
3. Decide on a few different combinations to colour the grids in and start colouring! Make sure that each side of a domino has at least one other match that your child can join it with.
Playing with the Visual Discrimination Dominoes
Pick one of your domino tiles and encourage your child to identify the colours on it. Once they do so, ask them to look for a tile that has the same colour combination as either one of this tile's sides. Place the sides with the same colours together.
Motivate your child to keep going until they have added all the dominoes and created a long chain!
For younger children, use fewer colour combinations and tiles as they may find too many different shades and pieces overwhelming. Feel free to up the challenge for older kids.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this activity. If you would like to share your experience playing with these DIY dominoes, tag us at #CoCreatewithshumee. Stay home and stay safe!
Anushikha Bansal is a DIY blogger and the co-creator of #noprepkidsactivity. You can follow her @toddler_ed on Instagram.