Roll a Dice

In which old tissue boxes are repurposed for a craft.

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The Library recently changed the facial tissues…breaking news, I know. While you are probably wondering, “So, what?” The “what” is that the packaging of the boxes went from a flat rectangular shape to a cube and cube shaped boxes just scream DICE and dice mean lots of roll a games for littles! (RUN OFF SENTENCE EXCITEMENT!)

April is National Poetry Month and inspiration struck from a Christmas gift from a few years ago, Haikubes. This activity is something that I share at work but not something I am comfortable leaving out because of my smaller users. There has never been any incident of someone choking on a cube and I don’t want one.

Pinterest also had some great ideas for roll a game (see end of post for links) and ultimately I went with a rhyming activity. I enlisted some teens and we got to work.

Materials:

Empty tissue boxes
Construction paper (used to cover the boxes)
Tape (lots of tape to reinforce the box where the paper covers it)
Clear plastic pockets (I was able to use clear plastic pockets for library books since the cataloger at work is not using them in our books)
Index cards
Sharpies
Scissors

We covered the boxed with constructions paper and used lots of tape to secure sides and corners.

The pockets were placed on each surface of the dice

On the index cards the teens wrote word families. On one card they wrote an ending (-at, -ar, -ap, -an, etc) using this master list from Enchanted Learning and on the other they wrote a beginning sound (b, c, d, etc) using sharpies.

We placed the cards in the pocket and now we have a game.

In Practice

Today I introduced the boxes during storytime. We read books by Jan Thomas including Rhyming Dust Bunnies. As we used the boxes, we found that the index cards kept falling out of the pockets. I suppose for future use we could either could cut the cards a bit bigger so that they won’t fall out of the pockets or use a bit of tape to secure the cards in the pockets.