Helen and I have been given some great resources to review over the Easter Holidays – lucky us! Helen reviewed the fab Orchard Toys games – Frog party and Match and Spell earlier in the week. You can read that review here. Today I am going to review another of Orchard Toys new games – Pizza, Pizza!
This game targets colour and shape matching primarily. It is for 2-4 players and designed for 3-7 year olds. It is currently priced as £9.50. Each player has a pizza board, you take it in turns spinning the spinners to decide which colour or shape piece you get and the winner is the first person with a complete pizza. But…. some of the slices have horrible things; watch out for frogs and slugs! I had real fun with this game – The children liked it as well!
As with all Orchard Toys games, you have the great quality and finish to the game pieces. They are hard wearing and durable, but also bright and engaging for the children. Obviously it targets shape and colour recognition and matching, but here is how I used it in my speech therapy sessions.
- Vocabulary – this is something Speech Therapists talk about all the time, and work on and set targets about! You can never have enough resources for targeting new vocabulary. For my younger children we stuck to talking about the ‘pizza’ and ‘slices’- some had cheese others ham etc. For my older children we thought about different types of cheese – was it mozzarella or cheddar? Was it pepperoni or salami? It was very easy to cover a good range of food vocabulary.
- Opinions – This is such an important and tricky thing for many children and luckily it is with food that most children first start forming opinions! You have two levels within this game as well. If the child is finding opinions hard, you can group the ‘yucky’ items e.g. frogs, slugs, worms etc together, and talk about how we don’t eat these (hopefully the child doesn’t want to eat them anyway!), but that the food items are good. At a higher level, you can then extend this and talk about which food items you like or don’t like. You can also support the child’s understanding that different people like different things – and that’s OK!
- Extending categories and knowledge – With some of my children working on language targets, when we got a ‘yucky’ card we generated ideas of who would like to eat those things. For example a mole might love to eat worms or that some people do like eating frogs legs! This rather baffled one young man I played the game with!
- Phonology/ speech – I found this game great for practising multisyllabic words and using words in sentences. There is great range in vocabulary meaning lots of words to practise the sounds – mozzarella, pepperoni, sausage, pineapple etc. Also when you get a ‘yucky’ card you put it on a picture of a bin as if you are throwing it away – meaning we practised a phrase such as ‘in the bin’ or ‘throw it away’. It was also really useful for blends – I find I am targeting colour and shape names with a number of children at the moment as they have blends so this game is great e.g. green, triangle, square, blue etc.
- Turn taking and interaction – Hopefully this is self explanatory!
So, yet another fantastic game from Orchard Toys! You can target may speech and language targets as well as shape and colour matching. I have already had a number of children ask me to bring the game again next time I come, so it has really been a hit!
Leave a Reply