Learn about Mythical Animals with this Fun Card Game

I love printable games because they’re relatively low setup (and low cost) but can be a lot of fun for kids and are often about subjects that you wouldn’t necessarily find a board game about.

Inspired by the book Miss Tourie’s Magic Creatures, Karyn at Teach Beside Me made up this printable mythical creatures card game.

In the book a child is looking for a pet and looks into Miss Tourie’s shop, where all the pets are magical, mythical creatures such as a unicorn and Sasquatch.

The cards show all the different creatures and give a little information about them. Creatures include:

griffen
kracken
Loch Ness monster
Sasquatch
golem
chimera
Cerberus
unicorn
dragon
hydra
hyppocamp
phoenix
Pegasus
black cat (even the cat has a bit of magic in the book!)

While a couple of the cards are related to the book, it wouldn’t matter if you haven’t read the book to play the game. It’s basically a matching game or a game of Old Maid (with the black cat being the Old Maid card) and a couple of wild cards thrown in.

Kids who already love mythology and magical creatures are sure to enjoy this game, and you could also make it a part of a mythology unit study if you do one of those.

Kids could also draw a card from the deck to choose a creature to research and draw their own mythical creature fact card about if you want to extend the activity and make it more educational.

Or just play the game for fun! There’s nothing wrong with that.

Learn more about the game at Teach Beside Me. You can buy a copy from Teachers Pay Teachers.

Looking for more printable games? Check out these easy math games, multiplication games, a who did it game and a printable escape room idea.

[Photo: Teach Beside Me]

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

Have you read?

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