After the Cereal Bar: Cereal Box Matching Game Tutorial

One thing about buying a LOT of cereal when it's on big sale is that you then eat a lot of cereal. And when you eat a lot of cereal, you accumulate a lot of cereal boxes. Cereal boxes, like toilet paper tubes, are one of those things that I just can't throw in the recycling bin. I KNOW I'll need them sometime.

And that's how my house accumulates a lot of cereal boxes and toilet paper tubes.

The shelf in my study held one too many empty Cascadian Farms Cinnamon Crunch box yesterday, and so the girls and I took some time off from goofing off and reading books and watching Clifford's frakking Puppy Days to first, of course, do the activities on the backs of all the boxes:

A board game played with dinosaur avatars is fun.

Some of the boxes didn't have stuff so elaborate on the back, but instead word searches and riddles and picture puzzles, etc., so I cut those backs off to save as a quiet car activity for Willow. A QUIET car activity--wouldn't that be nice?

I've seen cereal box matching game projects off and on all over the interweb--plumpudding's cereal box matching game is the one that I can most readily recall--and my matching game isn't much different. Since all my cereal boxes are Cascadian Farms boxes, all with a big bowl of whatever cereal it is on the front, I made my matching pairs from that big bowl of cereal. I cut two large circles out of each bowl--

--until I had enough for a good game. The nice thing about using boxes that are all from the same brand is that the insides of the boxes are all from exactly the same kind of carboard, and so match exactly.

This is a good matching game for Sydney, especially--

--because although the pairs clearly belong together, they don't match exactly. This requires pattern recognition and sorting skills to make a positive match, and these are good skills for little children to practice.

I still have more cereal boxes left--can you believe it? I may make a cereal box puzzle next...