Homemade Games: Where's Jerry?

One of the more relevant things to teach little ones are location words. This is especially vital when your children reach the age where they can actually be helpful. Long gone are the days of getting on your knees and looking under the couch as long as you have taught your children what under means.  To help you on your way to never-looking-under-the-couch-again bliss, we're going to get our subtle teaching on through a homemade game.

A lot of people hear homemade games and think 1) you're cheap and 2) it probably isn't as good as a game you can buy. I politely disagree. The great thing about homemade games is obviously the flexibility. You can literally do whatever you want assuming you are following local ordinances and such. You can even make a game called "Cuddleballs" that has nothing to do with cuddling or balls and instead is about pretending your child is a dog that talks in a really high pitched voice and gets mad at you when you forget they are being a dog named "Cuddleballs". It is not my favorite game. One of my favorite homemade games that we actually do play is "Where's Jerry?".

There is not really much to making the game or playing it for that matter. We use a Funko Pop Jerry Garcia figurine normally, sometimes adjusting to Larry Bird for "Where's Larry" or our treasured plush Walter White for "Where's Walter?". Again the great thing about homemade games, say it with me, you can do whatever you want. Use whatever you may have around the house like a stuffed Big Bird or Mickey Mouse or customize it to your liking with Kurt Cobain, Slash or Prince figurines from Funko.

As for the actual making of the game you will just need to print out some cards with locations under them. The game will basically be a mutated hide and seek where a player picks a card, and then hides Jerry in this case in a location that matches the card. What we want to focus on here are words or phrases like behind, next to, in front of, inside, on top of and of course the aforementioned super important under. You can also select other words you want to focus on as places to hide things. For example if you were really wanting to teach the word bathroom one of the cards could say "In Front of the Bathroom door", or if you were focusing on body parts you could put "On Top of your head". The world, as they say, is your oyster.