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I pulled down a preschool educational board game from the game shelf (which is getting rather high) that we have not played in a while: Hi Ho Cherry-O. While playing the game with my preschooler, I realized it does more than teach counting.

The goal of Hi Ho Cherry-O is to pick all your cherries off your tree and put them in your basket. You do this by taking off the number of cherries indicated by the spinner on your turn. The challenge that is presented is that there is a bird and dog on that spinner which will take cherries out of your basket and you have to put them back on your tree. And gosh forbid, the spinner may tell you that you’ve dumped your basket in this preschool game which means they all go back on the tree!

So you may think the only thing that the child can learning here is counting as they remove cherries from the tree (or put them back on). But there can be more learning opportunites with this game. How about practicing addition and subtraction. “You have 6 cherries on your tree and you get to remove 2, how many will be left?” - or the reverse with addition.

There could also be some more - possibly subtle - learning going on in this preschool game. Like chutes and ladders, you can never quite know where you stand in this game as far as winning. You can be far ahead of everyone then suddenly dump your whole basket. The child must control his emotional roller coaster as things continuoustly changes from “yeah, I’m winning” to “oh no, I’m losing”. And, unfortunately, Mom and maybe the child must show patience as the cherries continuously get knocked off the trees every time someone bumps the box. A hint: Put the cherries ’stems down’ onto the trees.

Overall, Hi Ho Cherry-O is a fun board game that makes a great addition to your stack of preschool board games and can be found at most online and offline stores.