Go Fish
Purpose:
This game works on many skills such as colours, animal vocabulary, picture matching, sentence building, question formation, and turn-taking.
- If your child has difficulty forming questions with proper grammar, or if they tend to skip words in longer sentences, this game should be played with the Sentence Board. (This is also ideal if your child has severe
speech delay and others have difficulty understanding them – they can point to the pictures to help get their message across.) - If you would like to use the Sentence Board, point to each picture on the board as you say each word in your sentence. Model for your child how to do this when you are asking questions in the game. This will not only show your child how to use the Sentence Board, but it will also encourage them to use as they will want to copy you.Download the sentence board & printable PDF here
How to Play:
- Print and cut out the Playing Cards (and the Sentence Board, if needed). Deal each player 5 cards to start and leave the rest of the cards in the middle, face down.
- If you have any cards that match in your hand, take them out as a pair. Each pair of matching cards is worth one point.
- Pick a player to go first, this will be Player 1. Player 1 then asks Player 2 for a card that Player 1 already has in their hand (e.g. “Do you have a purple cat?”). If Player 2 has the card that was asked for, then they must
give it to Player 1, and Player 1 will now have another matching pair, giving Player 1 a point. Player 1 gets to go again until they ask for a card that Player 2 does not have. - If Player 2 does not have the card asked for, then they tell Player 1 “Go Fish”. Player 1 then takes a card randomly from the pile in the middle. It is now Player 2’s turn to ask Player 1 for a card.
- If a player runs out of cards and there are still cards in the middle, then they can draw 3 cards from the middle to keep playing.
- The game ends when there are no cards left in the middle. The players then count up how many matching
pairs they have and get one point per pair. The player with the most points wins!
Alternative Uses:
These pictures can also be used to play Memory or other picture matching games. They can also be used as flashcards to work on simple phrases to label the pictures (e.g. “Purple cat”).