What is worse than sitting down to a wonderfully prepared meal, only to have issues with the table manners of your children? How do you correct and change the behavior you don’t want to the behavior you do want? What if you could do this with a fun little game? Golly Gee-pers has a fun set of Table Manners Cards that will help you help your child have better manners at the table, while having fun at the same time!

This simple little drawstring bag of cards will make a difference between a good meal and a great meal! With this one deck of cards, you will find heavy duty cards that are easy to be wiped clean if they happen to get dirty during the meal. You will find 14 different manners both good, thumbs up and bad, thumbs down. There are also 4 blank cards both thumbs up and down for you to make your own manners that are needed. These cards are double sided with one side being a girl and the other being a boy.

During your meal, you simply remove the Ready to Dine Out cards and decide if you want to play Game I or Game II. We played a variation of Game I in our house. Mom and Dad would pick two or three manners that we noticed needed to be worked on at the table. We would work together with the kids to hand out the cards. Thumbs Up cards were handed out for great manners, such as Using Please and Thank You. Or Taking One Bite at a Time. We also had to hand out some Thumbs Down cards when we noticed things that needed correcting, like Talking With Your Mouth Full or Using Cloths as Napkins.

While the kids were not happy to get the Thumbs Down, they started to pay attention to what the other members were doing so they could pass the card off to another family member. We noticed the kids started to pay attention to their manners with no yelling from mom or dad.

At the end of each meal, we would see who had what cards. We were able to talk about what everyone did right and what we needed to work on next time. Once a child finished the meal with only Thumbs Up cards, they were lucky enough to receive a Ready to Dine Out card! This meant they had mastered their manners and they got a special meal out. Pretty soon, everyone was ready to dine out, and we were able to have a great family meal out without stress or yelling.

If your family is working hard at manners and you want a fun game to help you out, this is what you are looking for. When a family of six can have fun learning manners during the meal, so can you!

-Product review by Amanda Hopkins, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, October, 2016