Play begins by turning over the cards depicting cute fruit and vegetable characters having fun in “their growing season.” Kids take turns in this memory game, flipping two cards face up, looking for a match. Broccoli dons sunglasses, skis and poles to take a run down the snow hill while an orange builds a snowman companion.
You guessed it! They are in season during the winter. Tomato is enjoying a picnic at the beach in her swimsuit while a watermelon is sipping a cool drink under the palm trees. Ah…summer! Asparagus, kiwi, pumpkin, pears and others join in the cute backgrounds of spring, summer, fall and winter. The lively characters invite language learning beginning with identifying and naming fruits and vegetables, moving to describing the seasonal backgrounds and learning the four seasons. I asked my little friend. “Where is the tomato?” to which she replied, “At the beach.” The peach was sweating under a hot sun, cooling off, “eating an ice cream cone.”
Finally, kids associate the appropriate season with their fruits and veggies, on their way to learning an important environmental concept of eating foods in season. As this memory game continues to be enjoyed and kids get a little older, they can understand that eating seasonal foods grown locally cuts down on energy for refrigeration, storage and transportation producing less pollution. As they learn more complex relationships between their actions and caring for their environment, they are using higher level language skills to explain associations and cause effect and become advocates for making smart choices to protect their planet.
Available at Adventerra Games
Written by Sherry Artemenko, MA, CCC-SLP and Founder of the PAL Award