Pigs in Pants! A review of Orchard Toys new game By Elizabeth

I have written before about my love of Orchard Toys.  You can read my post about their fantastic dominoes here.  I now have quite a collection, but was thrilled when Orchard Toys asked me to review one of their new games – Pigs in Pants.  I was sent a free copy to review.

Pigs in pants is a lovely matching game, with the high quality feel to the cards and vibrant colours that I have come to expect from Orchard Toys.  It is designed for children 4 years and over, for 2 – 4 players.  It currently cost £7.50.

The children I work with are always excited when they see a new game in my bag, but this one has raised some brilliant comments.  Ranging from the more grown up –“but pigs don’t wear pants”, to “PANTS, PANTS (lots of laughter) awesome, me want flag pants!”.  Either way the game provoked some interesting discussion before I had even opened the box.

The game does have rules, but I must admit depending on the age and the attention level of the child I have changed the rules.  For example with a younger child, we just tried to find matching pairs of pants rather than using the element of taking your opponents pants if you have a matching card.  But this just shows that this is a versatile game with a little pre-planning!  I also have one young man who greatly enjoys posting any card I have in a post box! Equally you could hide cards around the room and let the child find them. It’s just about finding what’s motivating.

• I have used the game as a motivator for speech work – so the child said their target word and then tried to find a pair.
• Many of the pants can be described using /l/ and /s/ blends, so you could use the cards directly if working on these. For example stripy, spotty, flag, flower.  It would also be useful if you were working on /p/ at the beginning of words.
• With younger children you could use the pants pictures to support the learning of the concepts of same and different.  You could also use it to support expressive language development, specifically early two word linking for example encouraging the child to talk about the pictures using a colour “pink pants”, “blue pants” etc.
• With an older child, I used it to support adjective and harder verb development. So we described the pants in as many ways as we could e.g. stripy pants, flowery pants, flag pants, bright pants etc. Then we used the rule that if you find a      matching card to you opponents last pair you can steal their pants.  Now this in itself caused quite a bit of giggling, but then we had to think of different verbs to say. So, for example, “I pinched your pants”, or “I borrowed your pants” etc which caused more giggling.

Yet again, Orchard Toys have produced a durable, high quality, fun and educational game that can easily be used to meet a number of speech and language targets.  Thank you Orchard Toys!