• Family game night, is one of our favorite nights. We do our fare share of Clue, and UNO, but sometimes it is fun to make up your own game. One of our more recent games was lovingly dubbed, “Silly Animals.” Sounds promising, doesn’t it? But really, it is quite fun, and a blast to get the whole family involved.

    Being the middle of winter and cold season, you probably have the tissue boxes ready to go without much effort

    The first thing you need to do is get yourself two empty tissue boxes. You want the cube kind, not the rectangular ones. You are making dice, after all! Being the middle of winter and cold season, you probably have the tissue boxes ready to go without much effort. Now that you have your tissue boxes gather pictures of animals from the Internet. Pick animals that your kids are somewhat familiar with. Print them, and glue them one to a side on one of your tissue boxes.

    Your second tissue box will have pictures and words describing what the animals are doing. The complexity here depends in your kids. Start with things like, happy, sad, laughing, silly, and so on. Write the words on white paper, draw a picture that goes to the word and then glue it to one of the sides of your tissue box. For example, the word sad would have a picture of a sad face.

    The game goes like this. Have your kids roll the dice. They then have to pretend to be the animal that they roll, as well as the emotion or action that they rolled. Our favorite was the sad penguin.

    This is a great imagination game, and I promise you there will be tons of laughter. Once your kids get the idea behind the game you can make their actions more involved. You can have them, tying a shoe, grocery shopping, whatever comes to mind. Then just sit back and watch the imaginations of your children go wild!