Monkey Munch Game!

This game was a huge hit with my kids this summer and it was so simple to make! I wanted to come up with a fun game that incorporated letter sounds and "Monkey Munch" is what I came up with. To make the monkey, I took an empty cereal box and wrapped it with brown construction paper. I cut out a half circle at the bottom of the box for his mouth. I used a lighter brown paper for the eyes, ears and bottom portion of the monkey's face. For the ears, I cut out the circular part of the ears, but I left a longer "tab" at the base of the ear so I could use that to glue to the side of the box. This enabled the ears to stick out. The eyes are just 2 circles - a bigger circle cut from the lighter brown paper and then a smaller one cut from white paper is glued on that. Then, I just colored in the black pupils. I glued all of these pieces on using a hot glue gun. The nose of the monkey was not glued because that gave me the perfect place to set my alphabet flashcard (see the top picture).

How to Play "Monkey Munch": Each day, put a different letter flashcard on the monkey's nose and then say, "Monkey Munch Time!" The kids see what letter is on the monkey and then they have to go around the house and find things that start with that letter. Once they find something, they put it in the monkey's mouth (so he can munch on them). If the item was too big, I just had the kids set it next to the monkey. So, for instance, if "F" is the letter, they could feed the monkey a frog, food, fruit, flower, fox, etc. Once they were done looking, we would all sit down and I would take each thing out of his mouth and the kids would tell me what they were. I would repeat what they said with emphasis on the letter sound at the beginning of each word.

There was not one day this summer that my kids didn't ask me, "When are we doing 'Monkey Munch'?" or "What letter will be on 'Monkey Munch'?" I loved this game because they were learning the entire time, but had no idea because they were having so much fun! A win-win situation!