Listening Lotto Sounds on the Farm

Want an awesome variation of Bingo for the kids? Check out this Listening Lotto Sounds on the Farm game. This game by Key Education is a game that challenges kids to develop their listening (and patience) skills while trying to fill their card by marking the match to the sound they heard. This can be a good game to help become more empathic to those with vision loss, by having the children be dependent upon their listening skills to win the game.

This game is really neat because when you play it while waiting for the sound, the kids are so quiet. It can also be quite funny when one thinks they hear something completely off from what the animal is! "A goat? No that was a dog silly!" The game includes 12 game cards so even a small classroom can play. It does require access to a CD player. It's even friendly to other languages as the directions come in English, Spanish, and French. Due to the nature of the game being sounds and photos on cards (no reading required other than the directions), it can generally be played then by those who understand the concept regardless of the language with the exception being that some countries may have different animals, items at home, and so thus perhaps some sounds may be unusual.

In addition to the Sounds on the Farm, check out the Listening Lotto Sounds at Home and Listening Lotto Outside Sounds for more variety. Sounds on the farm include a tractor, bee, cow, horse, chicken, pig, duck, sheep, cats, and bird, among others. Examples of some of the sounds at home are a teapot, vacuum, phone, pouring a drink, water, toilet, clock, shower, fireplace, blow dryer, and glass breaking. For the Outside Sounds, boat, helicopter, dog, bird, mosquito, car, police car, kids at the beach, lawnmower, bus, frog, windchime, plane.

Somewhere I saw this listed for under one year, but the real age group I'd say would be between 3 and 8. It's a game that can be played happily by a variety of age groups. Other than a Nursery Rhyme version of the game, these games are mostly raved about, so others seem to enjoy them as much as we do. Sometimes we'll just play guess the sound and close our eyes, play the sound and then write them down.

To win the game, one must fill up their card after having heard all the sounds from their card. I wish there were a few changes to make this even more fun. I wish they would have done a game card more like a 3 x 3 so that you could modify the rules to be the first on with a row wins. This would work great with a smaller group but likely cause lots of ties when there are more players. In that case, a 4 x 4 card would have been nice! I also wish the markers were plastic pieces (it starts with perforated colored paper that you must tear into pieces) it really take away from the game, just over time the pieces have begun to look more ragged.