Good Afternoon Everyone! Hope everyone is having a thoughtful & not too dreary Thursday!
Today features a delightful bookmark making activity brought to us from Chloe, an indoor active courtesy of Paul, & a rainy day favorite- Hut Monopoly from Jonathan!
Monster Book Marks
Name of the activity: Monster Bookmarks
Grade Level: 3 - 5
Individual or multiple people: Either!
Theme: Monsters
Materials: Plain A4 Paper, colored markers or pencils, glue stick, ruler, scissors. Optional: colored/print paper
Links and resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVkJPCp_1UQ
Further instructions or accommodations:
You can design the facial features of your monster any which way you want. Get creative with it! Maybe this monster has fangs and ears and a long tongue that stretches across the page.
If monsters aren’t your thing, this same triangular bookmark design can be turned into cats, owls or unicorns, or pretty much any animal you can think of.
Tip: Googly eyes are always a nice touch - but if you don’t have them readily available, use a penny or the back of a glue stick to trace a perfect circle for your eye shapes.
You can choose to follow the youtube video above or the written instructions with accompanying photos here- https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/diy-corner-bookmarks/.
Credit to Red Ted Art & Easy Peasy and Fun!
Balance Beam Challenge Course
Grade Level: K-3
Individual or multiple people: Individual (multiple people can do it by taking turns)
Theme: Active, working on balance and coordination
Materials: Painters tape
Location: Indoors or outdoors
Instructions:
Using painters tape, tape down a line of any length and challenge yourself along with others to only walk on the line without losing your balance.
Make it more challenging by taping down lines of different angles such as zig-zags or spirals and adding some obstacles to it.
Take it to the next level and challenge yourself and others to walk on the lines backwards or blindfolded (with someone supervising, of course!)
You can also use the tape to create a maze to try and find your way out of!
Hut Monopoly
Do you like playing Monopoly but often choose not to because it takes so long? Then, try this Hut-tested version of the game which usually only takes one to two hours.
For this explanation, I’m using a traditional version of the game, but you could adapt these rules to other versions. Start by setting up the board, the Chance and Community Chest cards, and letting each player pick a game token. Now it’s time to give each player their money. In this version everyone starts with the following bills:
3 x $500, 4 x $100, 2 x $50, 6 x $20, 5 x $10, 5 x $5, 5 x $1
This adds up to a total of $2200. Having extra money right from the start helps to speed things up!
Next, take all the property cards (including railroads, but excluding utilities - Water Works and Electric Company), shuffle them well and deal them out to all the players (one at a time clockwise like you would do for a regular card game). It’s important that each player ends up with the same number of cards, so if you need to leave out a few Railroad cards (or property cards) to make that happen, that’s fine. Any cards that have no been dealt out are then placed in the center of the board - these will still be for sale to any player who lands on them.
Now that the property cards have been dealt, it’s time to make some deals. It’s likely no one will have any monopolies (all the property cards of the same color) at this point, so players must spend a few minutes trading cards and making deals to ensure that everyone has some monopolies to start with. At the Hut we always make sure the trades end up giving each player a fair shot at winning - everyone ends up with roughly the same number of monopolies (and amounting to roughly the same value). Players don’t have to pay for any of the property cards!
Now that each player has a handful of money and some monopolies, you’re ready to start rolling the dice and moving your pieces. The rest of the game unfolds very much like regular Monopoly, using the same rules, but with a few exceptions - each player gets $300 for passing Go (this injects some extra money into the game, making the game more exciting), players can only build at the beginning of their turn, and there’s a three house building limit per turn. The house-building rules make it impossible for players to spend most of their money right away to buy many houses or hotels, which would throw the game out of balance. As the game comes closer to an end or houses start to run out, players can vote to lift these building limits.
I’ve played this dozens of times over the years with many Hutsters. It’s more exciting than the official version and is much less likely to wear out its welcome!
Hope these help any rainy-day blues you might have, and if you want some story-time later on, come by our new MRASP Facebook Page at 4 pm for Book 1, Chapter 1, of a magical classic series.
See you tomorrow,
MRASP
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