Find the Bunny: A Search and Find Game

I am excited to participate in Toddler Approved’s virtual book club, which this month is featuring Mo Willems, one of my favorite authors. Mo Willems has written several delightful series, including the Knuffle Bunny and Elephant and Piggie books.

We went to the library and decided to take out Knuffle Bunny Free: An Unexpected Diversion. In this story, a young girl named Trixie flies with her parents to Holland, and forgets her favorite stuffed animal, Knuffle Bunny, on the plane. When she realizes Knuffle Bunny is gone, she dreams of all the fun places and boys and girls Knuffle Bunny will visit. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is adorable.

We played a game based on the idea of Knuffle Bunny visiting various locations. I superimposed an image of one of our stuffed bunnies onto twelve of our pictures (these are the “place cards”), and gave clues for where to find the bunny. If you click here, you can download the cards to play this game.

Making the cards

My game includes twelve “place cards” and one “bunny card.” The cards are created by superimposing a picture of a favorite stuffed bunny over photos we had using Gimp (an open source image editor comparable to Photoshop).

To get the bunny picture, I placed it on a contrasting background (I used a bright blue child’s chair), and snapped a picture.

Then I had to extract the image from the background, and choose the pictures to superimpose the bunny image as the foreground.

Playing the game

First we reviewed all the cards together. For my 4 year old, we used all twelve cards, but for younger kids, you could use fewer.

I set the stage for the game with a story about taking the bunny with us on a trip and forgetting him somewhere. Then the kids closed their eyes while I hid the bunny under one of the cards. Then I gave them clues for where to find the bunny.

Some of the clues I used were:

“The bunny might get salt water on his fur” for the beach
“The bunny is near something blue” for the boat, and
“The bunny is on top of something that starts with the letter T” for the one with the turtles.

They loved turning the cards over to “rescue” the bunny!

Modifications:

We also played a slight variation on this, where my son asked the questions about what the bunny is doing. So playing this way, he asked, “Is the bunny standing on sand?” If the answer was yes, we would remove all the pictures that did not have sand. Keep narrowing down the cards until the one with the bunny is left.

For the youngest players: When we play with our 11 month old, we put out 3 cards, hold up the bunny for him to see. Then we say, “Here’s the bunny. Look, the bunny is hiding!” and then we put the bunny under a card, with my baby looking on. Then we said, “Where did the bunny go? Let’s find the bunny! Point to where the bunny is hiding.” We always end with enthusiastic clapping.

Check out some of the images from the cards below.

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PlayDrMom says:

18 June, 2012 at 12:47 pm

How fun! What a great idea!

Carolyn says:

21 June, 2012 at 11:17 pm

Thanks!

Danielle says:

18 June, 2012 at 3:52 pm

Such a great idea! We will need to try this one out too!

Carolyn says:

21 June, 2012 at 11:18 pm

It’s fun- let me know if you want me to send you the bunny to copy into your own pictures as well

The Monko says:

19 June, 2012 at 12:34 pm

what a fantastic idea. Such a clever way to get kids thinking about the detail of and describing pictures. and such an ingenious link to Knuffle Bunny free. (We are yet to read it, looking forward to it though).