Pet Adopting Fun with Kitten Caboodle and Diggity Dogs from Educational Insights {A Review}

We just love cats and dogs in our house, unfortunately the closest we can come to the real thing, is stuffed animals because of my really, really bad allergies. The children, and daddy, would love a pet, but, alas, it is not to be. We do however, love the idea of games where we could pretend to be adopting animals. May I introduce you to Diggity Dogs and Kitten Caboodle from Educational Insights.

Both Kitten Caboodle and Diggity Dogs are played the same way. The goal is to adopt the most cats or dogs and give them a home to win the game. The game, invented by Hank Atkins, "A true animal lover," is designed to be played by 2-4 players. 

Each game comes with 7 stand up die-cut game pieces, either dogs or cats on sturdy board, along with plastic stands and 28 Object cards. The game instructions are also included in this fun, sturdy box. 

The animal game pieces feature real animals, complete with name and 3 items, consisting of pet necessities and/or accessories, that they are wishing for. It is these items that need to be matched to the cards in your hands. The game is a go-fish style card game where you decide which card you need and ask a fellow player. You can ask whomever you like. If they have the requested card they need to give it to you, if not, you draw from the pile. 

There is strategy involved, because the player needs to pay attention to which items they have, which items the pets want, and which items have been asked for by other players. 

Once a player matches all 3 items wished for by a pet, they are able to adopt them, placing the game piece in front of them, discarding the cards and taking an extra turn.

Here I was able to adopt Boris, because I matched the brush, cat food, and squeaky mouse. Other items to match are: the ball of yarn, kitty bed, bowl of milk and scratching post.

As I mentioned, Diggity Dogs is played the same way as Kitten Caboodle.

The girls are learning to shuffle cards.

And learning how to be content and gracious in what animal they are able to adopt, as they can't always get the pet they would like.

In this game the pet accessories include: a bone, a brush, a tennis ball, a bowl of water, dog food, a stick, and a doggie bed.

The girls love adopting their pets and giving them a home. 

The winner of the game is the one with the most pets adopted.

This game does not take too long to play, making it fun for younger children. Additionally, as players are to ask for items represented by pictures, it means there is no reading involved. It is designed for children 5 years old and up, but we have allowed Hannah to play as well, and she is 4 years old. She loves to play, but I would say it is best to have an adult help younger children as she needed help figuring out which item card to ask for, so she was showing her cards, letting everyone else know what she had.

I love that the game features real-life pets, chosen from an Educational Insights photo contest. In fact, you can find details about each pet in the Game Guide.

This is a such a cute game, simple to play, yet with a bit of strategy involved. Unlike Go-Fish, players need to have a bit more patience as they have to match 3 items. Items may even go back and forth between players before the 3 are successfully matched. We tried to make sure that one person wasn't always being the askee (the person being asked) as we figured that wouldn't be very fair.

We always love the unique games from Educational Insights, and these are no exception.

You can purchase both Kitten Caboodle and Diggity Dogs for $14.99 from Educational Insights.

You can find Educational Insights on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube.

Don't forget to stop by and enter to win either Kitten Caboodle or Diggity Dogs. 

Click here to enter the giveaway!

Disclosure: I received the Kitten Caboodle game and Diggity Dogs game from Educational Insights in exchange for my honest review. I received no further compensation. This did not in any way influence my review. I only recommend products I use personally and feel will be a good products for my readers.

Alphabet Matching Sun Activity

Even before we started My Father's World last month I had this idea in my head. I wanted to make an activity that would help with recognizing upper and lower case letters plus have the children work on their fine motor skills.

I glued 3 paper plates together to make it sturdier (I guess I could have used cardboard, but I like the way the edge of the paper plate looks like sun rays). Then I painted the top yellow. I also painted 26 clothes pins. 13 are yellow and the other 13 are gold as I wanted to incorporate patterns too. When they were dry I wrote the lower case letters on the plate and the upper case letters on the clothes pins.

The girls are to match upper case with lower case. Having to open and close the clothespins will help their fine motor skills.

School Time Week 23 (Ff, Dr Seuss)

We started this week off, as always, with Muffin tin Monday. We started F this week, so we had an F muffin tin.

The girls also worked on their Ff collages.  Our words this week are: 

flag, flower, frog, fan, fairy and fox.

We didn't get that much done this week. Tuesday was of course play group. On Wednesday we celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday by having another muffin tin based on one of his books, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish.

Of course, this book is not all about fish, it is about all the funny things that go by.  So the girls made their own "funny things."

Tabitha wanted to take some pictures of her own.

Tabitha's "funny creature" has wings and can fly.  It is sort of a fairy (she is obsessed with playing Abby Cadabby games on Sesame Street website) and it is a cuppy creature named Fluffy.

Amelia's is an angel.  That is all I got from her.

It worked well that I took out the above book for this week.  Originally it was because we were doing the letter F.  Then I remembered it was Dr. Seuss's birthday.  I also had a lower case/upper case fishing game planned.  The fish in the pond all have lower case letters written on them.  I had found a fish outline picture on Google that had the open space I needed to write my letters on.  Then I printed out some on blue paper and some on white paper.  The white fish have upper case letters on them. They have jumped out of the pond and the girls needed to flip them over and put them back on the right space.

I tried making a fishing pole with yarn and a safety pin, while the fish have magnet strip on them.  The magnet wasn't strong enough to pick them up.  The girls had fun anyway.

That is about all we got done this week.  Amelia wasn't feeling well and I had surgery on Thursday.  Hoping to have a more productive week next week.  All the kids have had the stomach bug, of course now they have colds, but we should feel more up to learning.  Which would be good, because I have plans.

One thing we did do was read lots of Dr. Seuss books.  We still have the Horton books from last week. So I took Horton Hatches The Egg to play group to read.  We also took The Lorax, which is one we read a lot at the Montessori where I worked.  Another one we read is Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Tabitha is no longer taking naps while the other girls nap.  Instead, she rests a bit on the love seat, spends time on more.starfall.com or sesamestreet.com or she reads to me.  We finished (finally) the first book in the Progressive Phonics series with the short a sound.  Now she is reading The Cat in the Hat to me!  We read a little at a time and mommy helps with some harder words, like "anything" or "something." Other than that, she is reading it by herself.  

I have decided that we are going to try to read at least one new book every day this month as it is Reading Month.  Besides the Dr Seuss books we have also read Now It Is Winter by Eileen Spinelli. The impatient little mouse in this story keeps asking his mom when spring is going to come so they can enjoy all the different things that spring brings.  His mother keeps telling his spring will come,while drawing his attention to the good things about winter that are all around him.  I thought it was a sweet way to focus on the blessings that we have.

I am participating in the March Read Along over at Helping Little Hands

There are many different bloggers out there who were assigned one day of the month to showcase activities they did in response to a book.  I will be sharing on March 9th.  Head on over to Helping Little Hands to check out all the great activities that are being shared.
Tiny Tot Time

Tabitha wrote the big V. I helped Hannah write the little one to the left.

I am linking to

Montessori Time

Well the girls used the Montessori materials sporadically this week. The one that held their attention the longest was the heart picks:

Sorry the pictures are a bit dark.

Here they are using the spooning with cotton balls. The cotton balls were what we used at the Montessori I worked at, with the toddlers.

Yes, she tended to use her hands to put the cotton balls on the spoon.

Tabitha seemed to enjoy working with tonging with the hearts. Unfortunately, the tongs came up missing and Amelia tore some of the mini cupcake liners off. Without being able to find the tongs I didn't worry about replacing the papers. Here are a couple of pictures from when it did get used.

She also seemed to enjoy the matching heart shapes activity I found at Carissa's site.

Tabitha also decided to try some tracing, all on her own. I looked over and she had taken one of the foam hearts and was tracing it.

For more Montessori activities head over to One Hook Wonder