Activity Village has a huge range of printable dominoes that are useful for all kinds of activities. In this guest blog post, Shelly tries out a set of flag dominoes.
Making Flag Dominoes
By Shelly
We often use dominoes as a learning activity so when we started working on our map of Europe and I spotted the European flag matching cards I immediately thought they would be perfect for a set of flag dominoes.
I kept it fairly straightforward so my daughter could help create the dominoes (she likes to help me when I create learning activities and I have found that she actually learns a lot while she is busy creating the different activities). We started by creating a very basic domino template. We used a flag matching card and drew around it so we had the correct size and then cut out a number of card strips.
Using the matching cards to judge the size of the domino strips
My daughter wanted to draw a black line down the centre of the dominoes (just because dominoes always have a black line down the centre, but that was really just her personal choice) and then we started cutting out and sticking down our flag matching cards.
Creating her own flag dominoes using the flag matching cards
The key with this is the flag and the name of the country must be on different domino cards. Have a lock at the photo below. The flag of the UK and the words United Kingdom are on different dominoes.
It really is very easy to set up. The main thing is the time it takes to cut everything out.
My daughter found the European flag cocktail stick pages very useful because they have all the flags set out over 2 pages. The first few times she attempted the dominoes she used this sheet as a way to check herself.
Using the flag dominoes
Matching the cards and learning the flags
I think the flag matching cards turned into a really nice domino set for the kids and it is a great way to help them learn which flags belong to which countries. After just trying it a few times by daughter was already remembering most of the countries. There are a lot of different European flags in this set so you could always start by only selecting a few and as the kids learn slowly increase the flags you are giving them.
You can also create dominoes with any of the other matching cards from the site. We have created a few over the years – I love sight word dominoes like these ones:
Animal word card dominoes using farm animal vocabulary matching cards
It is the exact same idea - I just printed out the matching cards, created card domino templates and then glued the pictures and word down. You could also use the same idea for lower case and upper case alphabet letters or even number matching dominoes. I think the count these petal matching cards could be turned into a very cute set of basic counting dominoes.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 8 and 10. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
