13 Original Colonies Dominoes Game

My kids are studying U.S. History this year, which I'm very excited about.  All week, I've been posting printables and ideas for making history a bit more exciting for the early elementary age grouping.  Today, I have a playable dominoes set that is designed to help kids be able to identify the 13 original colonies.


Orginally, I wanted to do all 50 states, and I still might eventually, but I thought 13 was probably a good place to start.  As I said, this is a real set of dominoes, designed in the traditional way, not a simple matching game.  There are 91 pieces, which is plenty for a 6, 7, and 8 year old to learn at first.  As you can see, the very smallest players can just match colors and shapes, while the older kids can be asked to name the state before they lay down their play piece.  The printable also includes a cheat sheet with all the names of the states next to their shape.

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My shipment of wood rectangles didn't arrive in time to get this next section done before I wanted to publish this post.  I will update again when I have this all completed.

It's totally possible to print the dominoes tiles, cut them out and just start playing, but I wanted to make our set more durable.  I found unfinished wood pieces on Amazon for a great price.  When they arrived in the mail, I laminated the front of the printable with packaging tape and used a glue stick to attach them to the wood.  Pretty soon, I had 91 tiles ready for play time!


My kids know how to play Mexican Train Dominoes, so we used our new 13 Colonies dominoes to play this time.  In the game, when you run out of dominoes of your own that you can play, you have a "flag" you put up to alert the other players that you need help.  For a 13 Colonies game, you could use Safari Ltd Colonialist toob figurines.

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