Cootie Catchers: How to Construct and Play with a Paper Fortune Teller

A cootie catcher is a type of paper fortune teller that kids love to play with. Cootie catchers are super easy to construct and can keep kids entertained for hours. All you need to create a cootie catcher is a pair of scissors, some paper, and some kind of writing utensil, such as markers, crayons, colored pencils, or even a plain old pen (but it is more fun to decorate the cootie catchers and make the super colorful!)

1. You'll need a piece of square paper in order to make your cootie catcher. If you have the standard 8X11 sheet of paper, no problem, you just will need to make it a square paper on your own. You can do this easily by folding one corner of the paper over to the other edge, creating a sort of trapezoid with the folded triangle on top and a flap on the bottom. Cut off the bottom flap and unfold the square paper.

2. Now that you have a square paper with a diagonal crease in it, you need to make another crease going across the other diagonal. Do this by folding the other two edges of the square piece of paper, and then unfolding them again. The creases in the square paper should look like a diamond.

3. Next, fold each corner of the square paper into the center. This will form a smaller square paper, and it will look sort of like there is an "x" across the square. You should be able to count four triangles that make up the square paper-the triangles are formed by the folded in corners.Make sure that each folded corner of the square paper makes a crease.

4. Unfold the corners that you just folded in. There should be several crease marks in the square paper.

5. Flip the cootie catcher over and fold each corner backwards in the opposite direction, again forming the square paper into a smaller square that looks like it has an "x" across the front. But this time, instead of the new square being split into four triangles, the creases will make it look like there are eight very small triangles on the cootie catcher.

6. Write each number from 1 to 8 on the small triangles on the cootie catcher.

7. Lift up the flaps on the cootie catcher and write the fortune on the triangular space underneath. You can split this space in half and assign a fortune to each number marked on the cootie catcher (which means you write eight fortunes total). For cootie catchers with less space, or cootie catchers that need to accommodate larger handwriting, you can cut the number of fortunes to 4 and have fortunes 1 and 2 share the first fortune, 3 and 4 share the next one and so on. The fortunes for this paper fortune teller can be simple, funny, strange or meaningful. The cootie catcher could be filled with ancient Chinese proverbs, Bible verses, or jokes. The contents of the cootie catchers are up to you! I like to create all kinds of fortunes, such as, "you will be president" or "Watch out for purple people eaters," or "You will win the lottery."

8. Flip the cootie catcher flaps back over and draw a color on each flap. If you don't have colored writing utensils, you can write the name of a color, or the name of any topic (ie. Animals, movies, fairy tales etc.).

9. To hold the cootie catcher, stick both of your thumbs and both your forefingers into the four flap pockets. When you hold the cootie catcher, all four corners should meet in the center at a point. Now you're ready to play with the cootie catchers!

How to Play With Cootie Catchers

1. Hold the cootie catcher as instructed above and have someone else choose one of the colors on the top folds of the cootie catcher.

2. Use the cootie catcher to spell the color, opening and closing the cootie catcher once for each letter in the name of the color. To open and close the cootie catcher, you'll move it up and down and side to side. For example, if the person chose the color green, you'd open and close the paper fortune teller five times because there are five letters in the color green.

3. When you're done using the cootie catcher to spell the letters in the color, it should be open to four numbers. Have the person choose one of these numbers.

4. Open and close the cootie catcher again, spelling the number of letters in the number they chose-if they chose two, you'd move the paper fortune teller three times (T-W-O).

5. Repeat step four, but have the person choose a new number shown on the cootie catcher.

6. Have the player choose one final number on the cootie catcher, but this time, instead of moving it in and out, unfold the flap and read the fortune on the inside of the paper fortune teller.

Possible variations for cootie catchers:

-Instead of colors on top, use animals, names, foods or any other topic you can think of

-Use passages from the Bible or from a favorite book or story instead of fortunes in the paper fortune teller

-Use jokes for your fortunes

-Replace the cootie catcher fortunes with commands, such as "hop on your left foot 7 times"

-Make a love themed cootie catcher or a Valentine's Day paper fortune teller with love quotes, or commands such as "Dance with the person to your left" or "kiss the person to your right"

-Make a Halloween cootie catcher by putting scary things like ghosts and vampires in place of colors. Replace the cootie catcher fortunes with pictures of candy. When somebody chooses a kind of candy with the paper fortune teller, you can give them a piece of the type of candy they chose, or have them take a piece of that candy from a basket. This is a great game to play at a Halloween party or with trick-or-treaters. You could also vary it to fit other themes, such as birthday parties or Holiday parties.

I think making your own cootie catcher is a lot of fun, but some people are too lazy to make personalized cootie catchers. If you don't want to construct your own cootie catcher, you can find printable cootie catchers online at http://familyfun.go.com/printables/games/printable/cootie-catcher/.