Teaching tarot to children, isolation edition.

The school holidays have been a rather mixed bag here so far. We had to cancel our holiday and visit to my Mum because my youngest tested positive for Covid just as school ended, so we spent the first couple of weeks of the school holidays isolating at home. And feeling very grateful to have a garden, to have plenty of space, to have the Olympics to watch. We moved into Virgo season a little early, decluttering the house and completing craft projects. And at the request of my Sagittarius rising son Ashley (whose Covid mainly took the form of a tummy bug and who recovered just fine after a few days), we did some tarot learning. We told stories, as we often do with the cards, and then Ashley invented a game which actually turned out to be a brilliant way for him to get to know the cards and reinforce what he’d already learned about them. So I wanted to share it here, it case others want to have a go.

And its really very simple. We took it in turns to lay out rows of three cards, face down, having already chosen two cards which have something in common and one which is the odd one out. So it might be an even number when the others are odd, a Cups card amongst Pentacles or a Major arcana card among court cards or Minors. Then the other person has to guess, without seeing the cards, which is the odd one out.

So. We’re developing psychic skills, right there. And we’re learning, or revising, the different groupings of the tarot deck. In the image above, the top row has the Three of Pentacles as the odd one out, with the other two Cups cards. The second row is all Cups - the Queen is the odd one out because she is a Court card but also because her number would be thirteen (taking Page as 11, Knight as 12, Queen and 13 and King as 14) and therefore odd, whereas the other two cards are even numbers. Then there are two Major arcana cards with the King of Cups as the odd one out, doubly so because he is number fourteen and the two Majors there both carry odd numbers. And the bottom row has two Pentacles cards with the Four of Cups as the odd one out, because it’s the only Cup but also the only number card - Ashley already knows that the Aces are different, he was very insistent on that point!

So there you go, very simple, but kept us entertained for ages and led to some great conversations about the different cards. I liked it because we could start with something as simple as odd and even numbers and build the tarot knowledge from there. Also intriguing that it’s my double Taurus, science and technology-loving son who asks for tarot practice whilst my creative, arts and crafts loving daughter is just a little nervous of them…