Travel-friendly DIY Lolly Stick Games

These activities are fab for families, not only because they can be modified for several ages, but because they are SO travel friendly! We pop ours in a zip lock bag that slots into whatever bag we have with us and they take up virtually no space - even less because we made some of them double-sided to pack 2 games into 1. Most of these activities could be started as young as 2 years old - we recommend altering the difficulty according to your child's needs.

The beauty of these DIY lolly stick games is you can add more stickers (and complexity) to each activity for more of a challenge to suit more able children.

Top tip: if you don't have a variety of stickers, use coloured pens to draw your own designs - they can be as simple as you like so no need to worry about being a great artist!

Activity 1: DIY Puzzles

1. Place two lolly sticks side by side so the edges are touching

2. Place a sticker so it spreads across both sticks - character stickers or pictures work well

3. Using a craft blade or stanley knife, slice to separate both sticks again, leaving half the design on one stick and half on the other

4. Repeat with a few more sticks until you have your desired number of puzzles

5. Watch as your little one matches the pictures back together again!

Picture stickers work well - add more to up the difficulty!

Activity 2: Sequence matching

1. Using small stickers such as circles or coloured shapes, create a line of them along your lolly stick

2. Copy this sequence of stickers onto another lolly stick, so it matches the first you made. 2-3 is a good number for beginners, using more the older or more able your little one is

3. Repeat until you have several sequences

4. Jumble them up for your little one to match them back together!
   

We used star stickers to make our sequence activity

Activity 3: Match-the-dot shape building

1. Place one dot or circle sticker at each end of your lolly stick. Make a variety of combinations e.g. pink and yellow, blue and orange, orange and green and so on

2. If you don't have small stickers, use a pen to colour your own circles onto each end

3. Use flashcards or shapes drawn onto paper for your little one to copy - the aim is to make a shape out of the sticks, but only matching colours can touch!

4. You could use a larger sheet of paper placed underneath as a guide if your child is finding the free-form too tricky. You could also simply leave the sticks for them to explore what they can create in this way!

This one is trickier than it looks!

Activity 4: SNap!

Tip: reuse your sticks from activity 3 for this one - or from activity 2 if your kids are really up for a challenge! Make sure there are at least 2 of each pattern.

1. Sort the sticks into equal piles, face down, for each player (you need a minimum of 2)

2. The first player takes a stick and places it face up in the middle

3. The next player takes one of their sticks and turns it face up

4. When a stick matches the one in the middle, the first person to shout 'SNAP' wins that stick, plus the pile in the middle

5. The game ends when one person - the winner - has won all of the sticks, and there are no sticks left

Activity 5: Letter matching memory game

This is fab for little ones to complete either independently or with more players. If there are 2 or more players, the winner is the one with the most matching pairs at the end of the game!

1. Using a coloured pen, write a capital letter on the end of one stick, with the corresponding lowercase letter in the same colour on another stick

2. Repeat with several random letters. Literacy tip: use random letters rather than 'A, B, C' to encourage actual letter recognition rather than just recall of the alphabetical order

3. For beginners, simply jumble the sticks and encourage matching. For the full game, place them all face down like in a game of 'pairs'

4. Turn two over at a time - if they are a match, the player gets to keep the pair and take another turn. If they don't match, turn them back over and try to find a matching pair

5. Repeat until all of the upper and lowercase letters have been matched up

Activity 6: Colour sorting

1. Use different colours of washi or painter's tape or pens to create coloured strips on a cardboard box

2. Cut holes into the strips using a knife or scissors

3. Use ready-coloured popsicle sticks or add dot stickers or coloured circles to plain ones

4. Place them in a pile and let your little one sort them into their correct categories, working on their fine motor skills while they're at it!

This one is perfect for younger littles, too. Our 2 year old is pictured above!

There you have it. 6 simple DIY activities that will test problem solving, fine motor skills, colour recognition and much more - all with simple popsicle sticks! You can get really creative with these but this guide just provides a general framework for the activities. Don't forget to take them with you on your next outing for a quick game if you have any unexpected waiting - great for boredom, bonding and keeping screens at a minimum.

Until next time - wishing you and your littles a happy Kidhood!