Take two butter tub or cool whip lids.

Put them together top inwards… lip out.

Staple or glue together in the center.

Let your kids decorate their card holders with fun stickers, etc.

Cards are placed between the two lids around the top and sides.

My kids LOVED these and we had to make them for every child that came to our house and played cards. We even made them for a friend who was in a rehab center because she couldn’t hold her cards.

I hope I described the “how to’s” clearly enough.

I’m a member of a Welsh-learning group for adults. To learn the colors in Welsh, I made a deck of playing cards with one Celtic knot design in the center, then colored it nine different colors (think Crayola 8-box plus gray). I printed the deck, just four sheets of card stock, and we played ‘go fish’ in Welsh. NEVER underestimate your kids’ ability to absorb and RETAIN information while playing. My boys, age 12 and 14 at the time, played less than half a dozen hands with me to test the quality of the new printer and BOTH know four of the nine colors a year later.

Why? Because kids have a powerful reason to associate the NUMERAL with the value instead of continually counting pips.

What to do? War– Try several variations: Set a value near your child’s counting limit (at three, it was between twenty and thirty, at four we used fifty or seventy five, and by age five it was often well above 100). THEN- players turn over cards as usual, BUT you

- add both cards together and the winner of the flip adds the total toward their ‘score’. First to reach the goal amount wins.

- start with the goal score and SUBTRACT in the same way as above, and the winner is the first to reach 0.

- Each player keeps their score individually BUT, the winner of a round gets a SMALL bonus: the difference between their card and the losing card. So 8 and 3 are cast, the winner adds a bonusu five points to their score. Works for either addition or subtraction.

-very simple and for my kids a very LOUD variation: One person is “odds” and the other “evens”. Game play is as normal except the players alos calculate EITHER the sum or the difference between cards and slap their hand onto the pair, shouting “odd” or “even”. The 6yo liked to try to psych out his 3.5yo brother, so we instituted a four-point penalty for the second or later “mistake”. A drew 8, B drew three, the child who’d chosen “odd” would win the toss. HINT: GIVE YOURSELF “ODD” when playing one-on-one with your child. Yes, they win more often, *G*.

Start with a “resource pool”– something small and fairly healthy, but not messy. Cheerios are better than hulled sunflower seeds, and ten years later I still can’t LOOK at colored mini-marshmallows, so be WARNED. This works best for early years, and there’s a lot of munching, so only play one or two games this way. Make up some rule “numbers bigger than my age” or “numbers smaller than the number of people in our family”. THEN play as normally and whenever *your* card falls within the rule, you get a munchie or two. It’s a good transition into “extra rules” forms of the game, but it’s also a lot of fun purely for rules like “Number of people in the waiting room wearing pagers.” It was amazing what the kids NOTICED casually about the world around them!

I could go on and on– we had about a hundred variations between ‘war’ and ‘go fish’ ALONE, so instead I’ll close with some printing tips: regular cards are close to 2.5″ wide and 3.5″ long, but some of the boys’ favorite decks were 2*3″ cards made from extra vocabulary flash cards I had on hand, so don’t feel bound to the “normal” size. Print EITHER fronts or backs on card stock, then leave them overnight under a book and print the reverse side the next day. There’s less color bleedover, less smudging at the feed points, and less chance of slipping.

HAVE FUN.

Here is the way it works:
Draw 5 cards.
Add up the numbers on the cards.
Do that many jumping jacks, crunches and push-ups.
Rest for that many seconds.
Draw 5 more cards.
Repeat the process until you work through the whole deck.

It may take a while before you are able to complete the whole deck but do a little more each workout and soon you will be exercising your way through 52 cards.

I keep the deck in my purse and any time we are stuck waiting somewhere I can keep the kiddos occupied!