Holiday Games for 2012 are lotto-type games using images of the ornaments from Holiday Tree. They could be used along with the Holiday Tree activity, or played on their own. This first set of games comes in PDF and IntelliTools Classroom Suite® formats.
Printable Holiday Lotto
The PDF file for these activities includes two sets of ten lotto cards, both dimmed images and outlines, and the Holiday Lotto tiles to print and cut apart. Besides using the cards and tiles for lotto games, the tiles can be used for games like Remember and Go Fish.
Classroom Suite Holiday Lotto
There are four games at different levels of difficulty, but all four involve matching images of the ornaments to either dimmed pictures or outlines in a 3 X 3 grid. There are 10 different lotto cards for both the dimmed pictures and outlines. The card is chosen randomly at the start of play.
If an inserted picture has no match, students can clear it by clicking a Throw Away button. Pictures incorrectly placed on a non-matching square in the grid are thrown away automatically. Thrown away pictures are moved and shrunk down to fit in a trash can, then disappear with any of several crashing sounds.
Placing a picture correctly activates a cheer as feedback. Matching all nine goes to a victory animation backed by playing Jingle Bells. At the end of the animation, Play Again and Quit buttons appear. A hidden automatic counter keeps track of matches and triggers the victory animation.
There is a custom IntelliKeys® overlay for each of the four games, and the overlays are available in Dynavox® package format. See the Special Needs Access section on the System Reqs page for information on controlling the Classroom Suite version from PRC devices.
The following are notes on the special features of the four games, from the most difficult to the easiest.
Holiday Picture Lotto is a full-fledged lotto game in which the picture to match is chosen randomly when a player clicks a Get Picture button. A player tries to match the inserted bright colored picture to one of the nine unique dimmed pictures in the grid.
There are 16 fancy ornament shapes, each of which appears five times throughout the ten cards. There also are five large patterned balls and five small plain balls. Each card has a single one of the round ball shapes.
Holiday Picture Lotto could be played solitaire, but is best played as a competition, with each player on a different computer. Of the four games, this one requires the longest attention span.
Holiday Outline Lotto is also a full fledged lotto game with the picture to match chosen randomly. The Get Picture and Throw Away buttons are the same. Students match each full color picture to an outline.
One feature makes it a bit easier to fill the cards in Holiday Outline Lotto than in the picture lotto game. Instead of having to match the colors or patterns of the small and large balls, any one of them counts as a match for its outline.
In Holiday Picture Match, toolbars with the ornament pictures to insert are visible. Students browse the toolbars to choose matching pictures for the dimmed pictures on each card. The Throw Away button is the same as in the previous games.
To make Holiday Picture Match go faster for scanners, I have grouped the 26 ornament pictures into six toolbars. The rest of the game machinery, including feedback sounds and animation, is like the first two games.
Holiday Outline Match is the easiest of the four games. Students match pictures to outlines from visible toolbars. But instead of the round balls being wild-cards, there are only two of them, one large and one small. This leaves 18 instead of 26 choices in the toolbars.
Be sure to download the Teacher Instructions PDF along with the Classroom Suite activities zip file. It contains detailed information about the four games and a Troubleshooting section. Very little can go wrong in these games, but just in case, this PDF shows you how to avoid trouble.
Future Holiday Games
Plan to check this post again next year! I already have begun making a color match game and a completely different type of holiday game for 2013.
Applications needed: Classroom Suite, Acrobat Reader.
Subject area: Holidays.
Level: Pre-K through Grade 6.
Downloads-Activities
Printable Activities
HolidayLotto.pdf (3.2 MB) Holiday Lotto cards and tiles to print. Acrobat Reader.
Classroom Suite
HolidayLottoICS.zip (60.1 MB) Four Holiday Lotto games for Classroom Suite v.3 or later. Custom IntelliKeys overlays attached. See the Special Needs Access section on the System Reqs page for information on controlling the Classroom Suite version from PRC devices.
HolidayLottoDynavox.zip (1.7 MB) Four Holiday Lotto games overlays saved as Dynavox package files.
TeacherInstructionsICSHolidayLotto.pdf (3.2 MB) Teacher instructions and troubleshooting advice for Classroom Suite Holiday Lotto Games to print. Acrobat Reader.