Play with me . (Usborne Picture Word Lotto (Farmyard Tales Board Games))

Member Name: mumsymary

Product:	Usborne Picture Word Lotto (Farmyard Tales Board Games)
Date:	17/09/06 (1442 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: learning while playing

Disadvantages: none

I discovered lotto can be traced back to the year 1530 a lottery game” Lo Giuco de Lotto“originated in Italy. The game still played every Saturday. Now a form of this game is played in many countries. One form is often called bingo. Basically lotto is a game where a group of people play together each has a card with numbers or pictures on, there is a person who acts as caller and that person calls out a number and the person who has that number on his card covers it up and the first person to get all the numbers on his card is the winner.

The lotto game I am going to talk about is the farmyard tales picture lotto made by Usbourne toys. The illustrations by Stephen Cartwright.

I have played with many lotto sets with children during my working life and the Usbourne set is one we have at school.
This set costs £6.99p. You can buy it from http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/keggler/Usbornelibrary , or http://www.booklady.co.uk/range/cat-Farmyard-Tales --First-Learning.html.

This lotto set is suitable for children between the age of two and 6 years old. Key stage R/KS1 E.
Farmyard tales is a series of books by Usbourne books about Apple tree farm Mrs Boot the Farmer, her two children Poppy and Sam and their dog called Rusty.
There are many of these books and children are familiar with the characters. Osbourne have made several games featuring the inhabitants of the farm one of these is the lotto game. The picture on Ciao may not be the one on the set at the moment I found the picture on one of the sites I visited different however the game is the same.

This game consists of 4 brightly coloured double sided board’s 240cmx240 cm each. These have 9 picture squares on them. There are two sets of cards. One set has pictures of the animal characters and the words to match. One set just has the words there are 36 cards. Both the cards and the boards are strong very durable.
There are detailed notes to accompany this game which was developed at Nottingham University.
This game can be played with a group of up to 4 children each with his own board 5 if one is going to be the caller.
This game can be played as a straight lotto using the picture plus word for younger less able children and the word only side for those more capable . These boards and cards can be used to adapt the game in many ways; a simple snap game is one.
This game will help develop reading skill; children can practice their word and picture matching.
This game is published in English, Irish, Welsh and French so could be used as a tool in language classes.
This game can be bought at http://www.usborneuk.com/farmyard_tales.htm but is available elsewhere.
Playing games is a good way of reinforcing reading skills and have fun to . I would certainly recommend this game .

Summary: a game for beginner readers