How to Make Your Own Fishing Game

For children who are fascinated with fishing but can’t regularly do so, making their own fishing game provides a great way for them to fish without actually having to visit a body of water. With a few basic supplies the kids can pretend they’re catching the real thing from the comfort of their own home or backyard.

For a magnetic fishing game you will need a dowel rod or a long stick for each child. You’ll also need about 2 feet of string per rod, a magnet for each rod, construction paper, and paper clips. Start by cutting out about a dozen fish from construction paper. It doesn’t matter what they look like, but they should be about 6 inches long and about 4 inches wide. You can print out a coloring page of some fish or outline the basic shape of a fish and have your kids color them and cut the fish out. Supply stickers and some googly eyes for decorating the fish. Attach a paper clip to each fish using tape. Take the string and tie one end to the dowel rod or stick and the other end to the magnet. That’s it! Put all the fish on the floor, in a box, or in an empty baby pool. Now the kids just need to “cast” their line into the pool of fish and use the magnet pick up the fish by catching the paper clip. This is the basic fishing game.

To jazz up this basic magnetic fishing game you can laminate the fish and write on them with a dry erase marker. Score the fish by making the small fish worth 5 points, medium fish 10, and large 25. If it’s a rainy day and you want to get the kids active, write different actions to do on each fish. Then they can “catch” the blue fish with the polka dots that says, “15 Jumping Jacks” or the red one that says “10 toe touches”. Before the kids can fish again they have to do the action. If you’d like you can make the actions fish related by writing, “Flop on the floor like a fish”, “Swim across the room”, etc.

Another way to make a kid-friendly fishing game is to attach clothes pins to the end of the string. Make the string longer, about 3 feet instead of 2. To make the pond, set up two stools with a broom or dowel rod between them. Drape some blue fabric or a plastic table cloth over the rod to block the view of a person behind the blue fabric. When you get ready to start tell the children that when they fish they have to cast out their line and then wait patiently until they feel a tug on the line. When they feel the tug that means they’ve caught something and they should pull in their line. The children “cast” their lines over the blue fabric and wait. Behind the fabric sits a helper and she can attach fish to the clothes pin and then tug on the line. On the fish there can be a prize that is written or an action that needs to be done. Just for fun, print and cut out a few old boots so that sometimes the kids will just get an old boot when they bring in their cast.

A variation on this game is to let the kids fish for rubber duckies with their hands. With a permanent marker write a number on the bottom of each rubber ducky. If you have little kids you can give a small prize for every ducky that they pull out of the water. With older kids you can have them win a prize if they are able to pull 2 duckies with matching numbers. This works best when the duckies don’t all look the same. Make sure when you are writing the numbers that you don’t write the same number on two ducks.

Taken From Summer Nanny Jobs