Guest Author - Cheryl Lewis

We've had a Twister game in our house since my oldest son, who is a teenager now, was about 1 year old. It's a great game for motor skills, color recognition, patterns, etc. Most of all, it's just plain old fun!

Unfortunately we, no - actually, my oldest son has a Black Lab who tends to get into mischeif when left to roam the house without any other supervision than the Wirehaired Dachshund. If we put her in the bedroom she so graciously shares with her boy, she's fine and perfectly content. If we don't put her in her room, she'll make a mess.

A few weeks ago, in a rush to get out the door and get to wherever it was we were going we left Mandy (that's the 75lb spoiled-rotten doggie-baby) out of the room she shares with her boy. Are you getting a picture of how my son treats this dog yet? Anyway, Mandy decided to try her paws at Twister. Bless her babycakes heart, I don't think she was very successful at the game. She tried though! She tried all over the house but all she got for her efforts were a bunch of teeny tiny little piecies of colored cardboard and what appeared to be a shredded multi-color shower curtain.

So what happens when we're snowed in and the younger kids want to play Twister but the dog ate the darn thing? Well, we make our own! It was really cool and really easy, and best of all super doggone cheap!

We started with an old plain white flat sheet. Then we took a plate and laid it on the sheet to see how many colored circles we could get in a row on the sheet. We made sure they were evenly spaced. (If you're a perfectionist you can measure and divide, etc. but eyeballing seemed to work really well for us.) Then with a different colored marker for each row we traced around the plate right onto the sheet. Then we colored in each circle in the same color as the traced outline. We filled up the sheet with rows of colored circles.

After the sheet was done we needed a selector board. We started with a small poster board, colored markers, a brad, a plastic spoon and a glue gun. My daughter cut the poster board into a nice perfect circle and then divided up the circle like a pie. She colored in each slice of the cardboard pie using the same colors from the circles on the sheet. She hot glued the brad to the plastic spoon. She poked a small hole in the center of the multi-colored poster board pie and inserted the brad. She made sure not to clasp the brad too tightly so that it would spin.

Voila`! The kids had themselves a new Twister game and had a ton of fun making it. We've decided if ol' babycakes Mandy tears this one up, we'll just make another one instead of buying it.

I hope you'll give this project some thought the next time you're kids are stuck in the house because of bad weather.