Frozen, Planes, and Marvel – oh my!

The Wonder Forge provided me with these games to facilitate my review. All opinions are my own.

If you’ve been hanging around this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I LOVE reviewing board games, especially when they are made by my favorite board game-makers, the Wonder Forge. I used games a lot when I was helping Sophie with her developmental delays, and thanks to this review, I’ve now started using them with Jonah to work on speech. Yeah! I was excited to see that two of the Wonder Forge’s newest games are matching games, which are perfect for his age, and that they are two of his faaavorite themes, Frozen and Marvel. Jonah looooooves Frozen (we don’t let him watch TV in general, but we went on a bit of a Frozen bender after we got it on DVD and whoops…he now pretty much has it memorized. Whoops! Mom Fail.) and he also loves the Marvel Superheroes – Spiderman, Ironman, Wolverine, and the Hulk especially.

Jonah and I have been having great fun with these games (and Sophie is ga-ga over the Frozen Matching Game as well.) These are your classic, uncomplicated matching games, but the graphics are wonderful and there are 72 cards each so there are tons of different pictures. Here is how I play these with Jonah to work on speech. I take out about 20 or 24 of the cards so we’ll have 10-12 matches – that way the game will be a reasonable length of time for a lively 3-year-old. These games teach some great concepts in speech: turn taking, same, and different. So before each turn, I have Jonah say “my turn” or “mommy’s turn” and then no matter who’s turn it is, when the two cards are turned over I say, “Are they the same?” And he will answer either “yes” or “they are different”.

I need to note here that before we started playing these, Jonah already had the concept of “same” down pat. But we did use this for him to learn to articulate “not the same” or “different” and he caught on REALLY fast! I’m so pleased!

Other ways to use matching games for therapy: have your child name the object on the cards he or she turns over. You can say: “Who is that?” or “What is that?” and encourage your child to answer. If you’re using cards that aren’t people, you can also use them to teach function. For instance, if the matching game is of common objects, and your child turns over a picture of a swing, you can say “What do we do with a swing?” and encourage/teach him to answer “We play on it.” or “We swing on it.” For the matching games like the Frozen game, you could teach gender by asking “Is Queen Elsa a boy or a girl?”, etc.! Just some suggestions! 

Jonah likes these games so much he will even “play” by himself sometimes! His favorite cards are “Olaf Snowman” and “Monster Snowman”. 🙂

The next game I reviewed from the Wonder Forge is for the slightly older set, ages 4-10, but I imagine I will be able to start playing it with Jonah within 6 months or so. In the meantime, the big kids and I really enjoyed it! It’s the Disney Planes Sky Race game.

Like many of the Wonder Forge’s games, this is extra fun because it requires the players to be active and move about the room. I LOVE that! You set numbered markers around the room, and lay out an instruction card for each – it will tell you how you need to throw your plane – laying on your belly, between your legs, with your eyes closed, etc. It makes for some funny and silly plane racing!

Another feature I love about this game is that the game is won through part-skill and part-luck – if your plane lands closest to the marker, you get to keep that instruction card, but the cards all have differing point values, so even if you have the most cards, you might not end up with the most points – that gives the game a level of excitement because you really don’t know who the winner is until you all tally up your points at the end.

When Jonah is ready for it, this game is going to be awesome for working on following multi-step directions. In the meantime the big kids and I will keep enjoying it!

Do your kids need some new games for spring or Easter, or just because? I highly recommend all three of these! Thanks as always to my friends at the Wonder Forge for allowing me to share them with you!