Toys & games

A ballon is a small rubber bag that you can fill up with air or helium. Balloons stretch, and can get quite big when they are blown up.
Balloons you fill by blowing them up are very common at parties. Helium balloons go up if you let them go, and are fun to play with. Ordinary balloons go down if you let them go, not up.

Bingo is a game for many players, each with a card full of numbers on a grid. The numbers are drawn randomly and players win by matching five numbers in a row either horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

A carousel, also called a merry go round or a roundabout, is a fair ride for children. It has a lot of colored wooden horses on it - and sometimes cars or other animals too - that you can sit on, and then the horses go round and around in a circle. Sometimes the horses go up and down too.

Chess is a game for two people, using a chequered board and pieces of two different colours. There are rules for how far and which way the different chess pieces can move. The object of the game is to capture or check your opponent's king.

Croquet is a lawn game, which involves hitting a ball through hoops stuck into the grass with a mallet. There are many different variations on the rules for croquet, with the simplest being that the person who knocks the ball through all the hoops with the fewest number of hits wins.

A dart is a small, relatively heavy projectile with a sharp end. Some types of dart like the one in the picture are thrown by hand, other types of dart are fired by blowing them out of a tube with your mouth.

extension A die, plural dice, is a small object that you roll as a way of getting a random number while playing a game. Dice usually have six sides numbered from one to six, but you can get dice with more sides too.

A dollhouse is a house in miniature for dolls or other toys to live in. You can get small furniture to fit in the doll's house too. Dollhouses are a good toy to have if you are a little girl.

Draughts is a board game for two players, also called checkers. It is played on a board of 64 black and white squares. Each player starts with 12 round pieces on the dark squares. Players move their pieces diagonally and try to capture the other player's pieces by jumping over them.

A piece can usually move forward one square, but it can jump over an opposing piece into an empty square. Repeated jumps may capture several pieces in one turn. When a piece reaches the far side of the board, it becomes a king and can move both forward and backward. The game has been played for hundreds of years.

A frisbee is a round disc about the size of a plate usually made out of plastic. When you throw it it spins around and can fly a very long way at a slow speed. Frisbees are great fun to throw to other people, or throw to a dog so they can catch it.