I had five kids playing Dohdles! with me and there couldn’t have been more excitement around the table. Kids loved secretly sculpting their object or living thing and were proud to place it in one of the guessing circles around the board. Dough+ riddle= Dohdles of course. Every player takes their colored dough to create a shape loosely representing their item. Take turns guessing as you move your marker around the Dohdle, alternating asking 2 yes-no questions or ask for a letter of the word to be revealed. Players receive points for correctly guessing the Dohdle and creators win points according to how difficult their sculpture was to guess. Strategy suggests that you not sculpt too realistically but that wasn’t a problem with some of the kids I played with. We had such a laugh when we were guessing acorn and tea bag for a grape! Having raised boys I immediately recognized a “military tank” but was stumped by “rug” and “plate,” which frankly looked the same to me. Our funniest entry was a “mousetrap” which only vaguely looked like one but after the fact we could see what the artist was thinking. Kids learn to use deductive reasoning in narrowing their questions from general to specific, “Is it alive?” to “Does it have legs? or “Is it an insect?” Language learning is tapped as players formulate questions from broad categories of animal/object, alive/ not alive, object function or typical location to name a few. As play progresses, children need fewer prompts to ask the “bigger question” as they re-use those categories and learn new ones. Everyone wanted to continue play–what a lot of fun while building language skills!
Available at Thames and Kosmos. Click here
