Backyard Tic Tac Toe

The past few months we have been doing a lot of work in our yard. We bought and installed some new garden boxes, which we are really loving. We have a cement garden box that the previous owners of our house used, but it’s in a fully shaded area of the yard and nothing grows very well in there. We pulled out a lot of the dirt and have turned it into a play area for our girls. We had a lot of space to fill and not a lot of money to spend on it, so we’ve tried to be creative. After some googling, I found an idea for a backyard tic-tac-toe game. I combined a few different ideas that I found to make it our own.

I used small, square garden pavers that cost me about eighty cents each to make the game board. I didn’t do anything fancy to set them up, just placed them on our landscape fabric and then filled in the gaps with some rubber mulch. The game pieces were the fun part. I bought some river stones from Hobby Lobby and had my girls help me paint them various base colors. My four year old loves insects and I let her choose which ones to create. I used paint markers to add the details. They turned out really cute, in my humble and incredibly non-crafty opinion.

The bugs have been an especially big hit. Full disclosure: they don’t often get used to play legitimate games of tic-tac-toe, but my kids find them really entertaining to line up on the pavers or sort or  create their own games. I’m calling that a win.

In case you missed it, you can find a free printable worksheet that is about gardens on our post from yesterday.