Conker games

Whenever we go somewhere we MUST collect something. My pockets are full of stones, acorns, berries and conkers, just to mention a few. One day we visited Margaret-island (a small island on the River Danube, Budapest) and managed to collect tons of different fruit of various trees and bushes. 

Rose hips. conkers, sycamore "rotors", pine cones, acorns, London plane seed balls, wild pear, seed pods of China tree

So during E.'s nap time I put together this tray of all kinds of fruits and a magnifying glass. As soon as she discovered the tray she eagerly examined their texture, the surface and the inside of the fruits.

We collected a full bag of conkers and pine cones, half of which we took to E.'s kindergarten. The other half of cones we'll use for decoration and Christmas ornaments (see a later post) and the conkers we've used to play games with.

Counting conkers

I put the conkers in a woven basket and placed the number cards on the table. E. needed to put the right number of conkers below the cards.

When we played this game we'd just returned home from the nursery and changed languages. You can hear in this video how she is mixing English and Hungarian, and also, me asking back "Sorry?" all the time in a silly way ;)

I've found a super-cute squirrel grid game on prekinders.com and although we didn't have enough acorns or walnuts that squirrels love eating, we used our conkers as manipulatives for this game.

How does the game go?

E., Daddy and myself played so I printed 3 copies of the squirrel grid (of 20 squirrel) and put LOADS of conkers in a bowl. You'll need a game die. Of course, the youngest starts the game, throws the game die and identifies the number on it. The player then needs to place the same number of conkers on the grid. We take turns and the winner is who finishes the grid first. (You can play it as an addition game with 2 dice if your child is older. If he/she is younger, you can use a special die with only 1-2-3 on it)

I'll be the winner, not you Daddy.

Mind you! Conkers are slightly toxic, so it's better to know that just a very few animals can eat it (like deer), but people and squirrels never.

 Name written in conkers

I prepared my daughter's name, each letter on a different piece of paper. First, she put the letters in the right order, then following the lines of the letters, she placed the conkers along the lines.

 Krokotak conker mushrooms

What you need:

• conkers
• acorns
• play dough

Not as good-looking as the original idea, but they represent our family: E. mushroom, Daddy mushroom and Mommy mushroom. (from right to left) 

Last year we did some conker threading after making a whole on the conkers with the help of a screwdriver. If you haven't had enough of conkers, check it out.

What do you play with what you collect at autumn time? Share with me in the comments.