Every now and then an idea pops into my head that turns out to be great. It doesn’t happen very often mind you. Most often my ideas are total flops, but this one turned out to be pretty good, if I may say so myself.
It’s a simple idea, just a whole lot of hexagons with different coloured sections. We call them ‘Hexi Cards’.
Hexi Cards are simple little hexagonal cards with five different coloured wedges on each card.
The best things about these hexi cards is that they are really easy to make, and they can be used in lots of different ways.
How to Use Hexi Cards.
Little children will have fun with the hexi cards by simply using them to make patterns and shapes. My toddler had a lovely time playing with two sets of cards on the floor.
Preschoolers who are learning colours and math skills such as matching and patterns can use them to work on skills like labelling and matching colours, or finding matching pairs of hexi cards.
Older kids will also love matching and making patterns with the hexi cards. They could use them for a simple game of memory or my big kids made up their own domino-type game to play with the hexi cards.
To play ‘Hexo dominoes’ they used three sets of cards, one set for each player, and took turns matching coloured wedges. There was lots of problem solving, logical thinking and turn taking practice going on!
For older kids you can add a maths component to the game. For each colour you match you get one point. If you can match two or three colours in one go you get a point for each colour you match. You’ll need a piece of paper to keep score as you play, which is great for practicing simple addition.
You can have so much fun with a simple set of coloured hexagonal cards!
Download a set of Free Printable Hexi Cards
You can download the free printable Hexi Cards here.
Simple download the pdf file, print a few copies on to some cardstock, and let your kids explore with them.
This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. If you are printing on US ‘letter sized’ paper be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options.
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
What will you do with these Hexi Cards?
We’d love to see how you play with them so feel free to pop over to my facebook page and share a photo.
What kind of card do you print them on Kate ?
I have a Canon printer so I use Canon matte photo paper which is just like medium weight card. But you could print them on regular photo paper or even on plain paper and laminate or contact them if you like.
How fun! These look awesome. I can’t wait to see what my girls do with them. Thanks for the post!
Yes! Yes! Yes! How is it that I haven’t seen this post before? This has to be one of my all time favourite easy but fabulous DIY activity ideas, Kate! Brilliant! You can bet I’ll be making some of these for the hooligans in the new year!!
Thanks for sharing this! Found you through pinterest and this is great for a rainy day…
Thank you so much for this wonderful game! :)
I printed it four times – one remained as a board and three were cut into pieces- so we can play board matching as well with the smallers, and a quite long point counting side-matching game with the olders (9 and 12 years old). They loved it, and also cuttig out was a challenge for them too!
This game reminds me of another one, which is called Tantrix, where you have to match not only the coloures but the shapes too. You can have a look at: http://www.tantrix.hu/ but unfortunately it is only in hungarian…
Anyway, thanks a lot for this wonderful idea! :)
Barbara
These are beautiful. What a fun way to play with colors and reinforce understanding of hexagons! LOVE!
Loved these- found while searching for geometry lesson ideas. We ended up cutting a page down into diamonds and triangles too in order to build more shapes. Thanks again for sharing such great printables
I really like your game. I used my scrapbooking program to re-size them to fit in an altoid tin (2 stacks, side by side). I added magnetic paper to the back of them so my kids can play with them on a cookie sheet. Perhaps you’d like to release a version like that (since I won’t infringe on your copyright by putting my file on my blog).
That’s a great idea!
Unfortunately we don’t have Altoids here so I can’t create a set to fit a tin, but they are fairly easy to resize smaller and adding magnets is a great idea.