Ian McCall has designed two wonderful exercises that are great practice for younger children and fun for kids of all ages. We were quite taken with his Clover Patch Search game, where you browse among square photos to find the clovers, and maybe even a four-leaf clover!
You can offer this as a Take 5 activity, a fun reward for a job well done and some free time to spare. If you have a Smart Board or projector, have a little competition to see who can find clovers the fastest. Consider assigning names to each of the grid spaces so students can call out the location of a find. Here’s one way to do so:
- Visit the Clover Search game by clicking here.
- Resize your browser window to create even rows and columns of clovers. Setting the game for 24 clovers means you can have 6×5 columns, or 5×6, 8×3, or even 16×2. Have your students choose, and ask them if a particular configuration is easier for them when clover hunting.
- Name the columns in order: A, B, C, D, E…
- Name the rows in order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…
- Put the game up on a display so the whole class can see. The second column, third row down would be “B3” and so on, making easy for students to specify a location.
The main page for the site also includes links to “searching tips” and a fun geotagging map where people have “tagged” clovers they found. Finally, Mr. McCall also has a beautiful matching game that uses some very clover-esque aerial photos of Kansas crops, Random Kansas Farm Generator. Find the match for the featured photo among several similar photos. It’s another great game to play solo or with a group.
Play the Random Kansas Farm Generator matching game here.
Play the Clover Patch search game here.
A friend sent me this link and I must say I am absolutely ecstatic to see this wonderful review of this project I put together as part of my Communication Design thesis. Since this site is geared towards younger children I will note that while the search games linked here are wholesome and good there are links on the main page which can lead to content that is not suitable for children. These links are labeled “NSFW” (Not Safe For Work) and should be avoided in a school setting. I don’t mean to deter the exploration of the games and the other clover related content on the site, I am simply providing a warning to not allow unsupervised exploration of the entire site. I would be happy to answer further questions or brainstorm other clover search related activities with anyone interested and can be contacted at metaphorever@gmail.com
Thank you again for featuring my work here. The search for four-leaf clovers brings me so much joy and it warms my heart to be able to share that joy with others.