Are you BOARD? UNO I am! Plus a giveaway!!!

      

I love using my iPad and many games are now an app. But I still have all these card and  board games in my speech room. Do I give them away? Do I re-purpose them? Do I toss them? Do I leave them in the cabinet and forget about them?

Since my speech room is small I was given a cabinet to use in another location. It is close but I decided to house my theme unit boxes and some of my games.  The access to these  games is a little tricky since they are stuffed into the “theme cabinet.” I did make a list of the games to help remind me but… I think I need a better system.

I had thought about putting the game boards into picture frames but decided to try some other ideas floating around in my head.  So…I took home some of my games that included a game board or that I could pull out of the cabinet easily.

I put hole reinforcements on the  two corners of the game board that were being drilled.  We left the game boards folded so we were able to drill through two corners at once.  Be sure to drill on a board and not your counter! I was lucky enough to have my husband drill the holes. I think he got nervous when I has asked him where the drill was…LOL. But you can easily do this yourself too.  After drilling I placed hole reinforcers on the front and back of all holes. Now if this is all you want to do you can hang the boards from hooks in your therapy room and store the pieces in small containers. OR you can check out the next options.

FYI: I did not end up drilling holes in the Hi Ho Cherry-O or Chinese Checkers games. They did not have the flat game boards like the other games shown in the  picture above. I’ll come up with something else for them.

    

I purchased several options to attach to the game boards. The dry eraser sheets and photo magnet sheets were purchased at Office Depot and the felt sheets at JoAnn Fabrics.

     

Option 1: Dry Erase Sheets

This was super easy- just peel and stick. The sheets can be removed easily. Now here are my ideas for this option.

1. Use as a dry erase board…duh

2. Use as a barrier game- the board bends in half and can be placed horizontally or vertically. You can take turns giving directions on what to draw. You can also use window clings  like the spiderman ones shown and place them on the board and give directions. You can even combine these two ideas; for example- draw a house in the middle- put the black spider on the left side of the house- put  spiderman on the top of the house, etc. Once the directions are completed you can lay the board flat and look at the results side by side.

   

spiderman window clings

Option 2: Magnetic Sheets

I used 4″x6″ photo sheets but there are larger versions available which I think would be even better to use. These are not as easy to remove and reuse. This could be uses as a barrier game with magnets.

Option 3: Felt

I used felt sheets and a glue stick and double-sided tape. I used the glue stick but I think the double-sided tape would be enough- just be sure to add tape across the middle and along the edges. This is an option for attaching  pictures with felt or velcro backings (the hook part). You could use this to create stories, learn vocabulary, etc.

If you have room you could hang several boards next to each other to create a bulletin board effect. There are calendar dry erase sheets, cork sheets and larger magnetic sheets that would be options to try.

Option 4: Game Savers

While searching for ideas for storing games I came across this site- OBH Enterprises. They have a great product called GameSavers. These are plastic containers that are used to store your game boards and game pieces. The boxes come in three sizes to fit most games created after 1998. The boxes also include stickers to attach to the box for easy identification. I was happy to receive two of the GameSaver boxes to test. So here is my disclaimer: The boxes were given to me for free but my review is based on my own experience.

      

The larger electric blue GameSaver box is made for games like Monopoly, Life, or Risk etc. It is has a built-in money tray. I was able to put two games in this container- Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders and still close the lid. It measures 16 x 11 x 2.5 inches The game board must smaller than 15.75 x 10.5 x 1/2 inches (double folded rectangular or square boards) and  game pieces cannot be thicker than 2 inches in at least one dimension. This sells for 13.50 on the OBH Enterprise website.

The second box I received was the juicy orange midsize container. This size holds games like Candy Land, Chutes and Ladder, Clue, Stratego, Parcheesi, Charades for Kids, Scrabble, Jigsaw puzzles, Legos and more. It measures 16 x 11 x 1.5 inches. The game board must be smaller than 15.75 x 10.5 x 1/4 inches (Single folded rectangular or square boards) and game pieces cannot be thicker than 1.25 inches in at least one dimension. This one sells for 11.50 on the OBH Enterprise website.  I was able to put two game boards (checkers and Word Trio) and the pieces in this box and close the lid.

The snazzy purple GameSaver box holds games with double folded square boards The board must be smaller than 10.5 x 10.5 x 1/2 inches (Double folded square boards) and game pieces cannot be thicker than 1 inch in at least one dimension. I did not receive this size so my information is based on what can be found on the OBH website. It measures 16 x 11 x 1.5 inches. It can hold games like  Aggravation, Clue Jr., Charades for kids, Dora the Explorer, Family Feud, Monopoly Jr., Parcheesi, Scrabble Jr., Sorry, Scene-It DVD, Trivial Pursuit DVD and more. This sells for 11.50 on the OBH Enterprise website.

I  found these boxes to be light weight, stack and store easily. It was easy to recycle bent and broken boxes and replace them with these GameSaver boxes.  The GameSaver boxes come with one label per game.  There are times I store my boxes the long way and times I store them the short way. So the only thing I added was an extra label on one side of the box. Now I have lots of options on ways to store my games. I will hang a couple on hooks but I can still store the pieces in my GameSaver boxes. I will store others in the GameSaver boxes. One of the great things about these boxes is they are the same length and width which helps a lot when storing goes together. No more trying to stack game boxes of different sizes that just never fit together and can become an annoying puzzle to figure out which piece goes where. It looks like I will be ordering more of these once I get back to school and dig out the rest of my games.  FYI my Hi Ho Cherriy-O and Chinese Checkers games did not fit into the GameSavers containers. So be sure to read the will my games fit on the companies web page. The company also makes a product called BeachPack which can be  viewed on their website.

GIVEAWAY TIME…

I have a 25.o0 gift certificate to buy products on the  OBH Enterprise website. 

Enter now through 7/13/12  by clicking on this link to enter:  Rafflecopter giveaway

The gift certificate will be mailed to the winner.

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