I SPY

Game Catalogs

Welcome to I Spy. This is a simple game for young children, based on the traditional 'I Spy' game parents have always played with their children to fill time while waiting somewhere. It is a game that you can play with your kids, or that they play with each other.

To play, ask your child to find something in one of the pictures. You could say 'I spy a seashell. Can you find it? Or, 'I spy something green'. Or 'How many pieces of candy do you see'? You get the idea. It works especially well when the child also picks out things for the parent to find. (And better yet when the child picks out invisible, imaginary objects and makes you spend ten minutes looking for them).

There is a sample list of hints for most images - things to look for in each of the pictures, but you and your child will probably have more fun picking out things on your own. Once again, this is a game for kids AND parents. There is as much to find as you are creative enough to imagine.
-- Steve

Notes

Scanner Images offer the most color and look the neatest. These are the original type of images created for I Spy. Most of the scanner images were created by patiently placing objects on a high resolution color flat-bed scanner with the lid open in a very dark room. A good scanner has a 'depth of field' of about half an inch, giving some 3-D appearance to the pictures. The Scattered Images were created by gathering thumbnail images off the 'net or by scanning, then adding them to the same background sheet.

Computer Collages are a little less colorful, but have many things to find. They are made by electronic cut-and-paste from small scanned images, or from larger pictures.

Paper Collages are done the old fashioned way, by pasting a variety of paper cut-outs from magazines and catalogs onto a sheet, then scanning them in.

If you like this game, you can play anywhere, anytime, with what's around you. On a rainy day, newspaper department store ads or mail order catalogs work well. On a good day, everywhere you go creates a new scene to pick objects or colors from.

There is also an excellent series of books by Walter Wick and Jean Marzollo, published by Scholastic, Inc. (ISBN 0-590-46294-6, ISBN 0-590-46295-4, ISBN 0-590-45087-5, and several others) that go about doing this with far more thought and patience than I have used here. They're fairly easy to find in most libraries or bookstores.

H O M E . E-mail