Donut Game

You remember my 10 New Uses Tuesday post on Socks don't you? Remember those cute donuts I made from THIS tutorial? Well, I thought that they were so cute, I made four more.

I was determined to do something with them that would give them a little more purpose than the usual "tossing them out her play shopping cart" thing Avery thinks is so fun. 

Then I thought of an idea that I saw at another preschool where they took a few of the toys, plastic lizards and frogs I think, and arranged them and then took a picture of them. If you arrange them on a sheet of paper and then enlarge the picture to the size of a sheet of paper, then it is pretty much acutal size. Then you can print it and either laminate it, or I just put my in a page protector and taped the top closed.

It is that easy, now you have a 1 to 1 correspondence/ matching game for your toddler! If you have a younger toddler, just putting one donut on a picture of a donut is the first step (the one-to-one correspondence part) then they move on to matching the right color to the picture. Avery did a little of both and I was a proud Mama! 

If you want to see a mini tutorial with a couple of screen shots, click "Read More"

First I took my picture, this is the one I used:

Then I opened it in just Microsoft Office (or Word) after I changed the orientation to landscape and the margins to the smallest option so I could use more of the paper.

I pretty much loaded as the size of the paper but if it doesn't, enlarge it at the corners as big as you can. Then, really, you could just print now. But I chose to make this use a little bit less ink and save me a bit of money and cropped out the dark part and lightened it. First I chose the crop tool and cropped out the dark edges of the table by moving the little markers inwards.

Then I enlarged the picture again so that it was the size of the paper.

Next, I lightened it by going to the brightness tab and changing it to +20%.

 Then I also changed the contrast to +20%.

Then I was done! Either way works, like I said, but this way uses MUCH less ink, which leaves more ink for printing coupons...just sayin'.

I am linking up here:

Linking up here!