Recently, my wife made a memory game out of some cardboard and paper. She wrote words on the paper and glued them to the cardboard so we could have a deck of cards to play with. They were mostly sight words to help our 5 year old daughter remember the words. Getting those extra reps in can only help.

We played the memory game with all the cards flipped over and surprisingly, there weren’t a lot of tantrums with my daughter and 4 year old son. They had a lot of fun playing. We also played Go Fish and they had a blast. When some bickering came up at the end, we paused and took a snack break. They had so much fun when we first started playing this that my wife bought a professional version of the cards, but with sharks. That’s when things went south.

I’m not sure if it’s because the cards looked colorful and more attractive than the makeshift cards that just had words written on paper…or if they got hyper competitive about the games because they really know how to play now, but the fighting was a 8 out of 10 from the start of those sessions. We had to pause and take the cards away because they just didn’t get along. It was frustrating to deal with for everyone and we ended up all doing separate things to cool off.

After cooling off, my daughter and son moseyed back over to the cards. I was watching from across the room with the baby to see what would happen. To my surprise, there was not a volcanic eruption. My daughter ended up making up this game called Shark Attack and playing it with her brother. I’m not sure exactly what the rules were, but they apparently did because they played it for hours. Sharks needed to eat certain kinds of sharks or be paired up with others. It was interesting to see them come up with a game and be able to play it without arguing. The latter is obviously more impressive to me as their parent! Hopefully, there are a lot more games of Shark Attack in our future!