Game Day

Today was Game Day in our house. Due to my lack of oomph in the homeschool department these last few weeks, I decided to bag our traditional learning schedule (which some might say is not so traditional to begin with) in favor of a more fun, more relational learning day. Game Day.

Simple plan: There are four of us in our school, we'll choose four games from four different learning categories. Each person gets to pick one. We'll choose one math game, one puzzle, one word game, and one action game.
Each kid had a favorite category and knew right away which game they were going to "host" for us.

Math-brain Rebekah chose a Gardening game from the Math Mouse set. (It's an almost-12 year old set my mother gave me. She used it when she homeschooled my youngest brother and sister. Written by Cathy Duffy. I couldn't find a link to it.) We each had an imaginary garden which we were tending in order to earn a little spending $. Lots of outflow to get that garden plot tilled in the beginning, but once you harvest and market your imaginary radishes and watermelons, you're rolling in the dough! We learned dollar values, place value notation, adding and subtraction with regrouping and borrowing, and all sorts of other math-ish things.

Ellie the actress chose Charades for Kids as our action game. Acting the part of going to the dentist was a highlight. Anna, my partner, nearly scraped all the skin off the roof of my mouth. Remind me to steer her clear of dental school. Lots of laughter, lots of imagination, lots of physical activity on this rainy day.

Anna chose to play a Moms and Babies puzzle. To make it more interesting for my oldest two, I tossed out the challenge to find the baby that changed the most as it grew into an adult. The hands-down winner was the tadpole and the frog. In the process, the big girls were learning to be gentle teachers to their younger sister. She was learning to take instruction from someone a little more seasoned at puzzle-putting-togethering. And we also got to talk a little bit about what is a genetic difference between a parent and a child (ie. I have light brown hair and my kids have blonde) vs. a maturity difference between children and parents (ie. all fawns are born with white spots but as they mature, all deer lose their spots). I'm sure there is some scientific word to differentiate between the two. Tell me if you know what it is.

The game I chose for the word game was, Apples to Apples Junior. I love that game. My husband says it's a girl game. "Because you like to talk so much, you're interested in what words mean so you can add them to your arsenal." I think he just says that because he never wins at it.
So anyway, the highly intelligent and wordy women in my household enjoyed learning about nouns and adjectives, and using our creativity to come up with the best word match available. And we laughed a lot. I've done enough shouting and struggling lately. It's not getting us very far. I enjoyed laughing today.


Believe it or not, I haven't even gotten to my main point. (Ok, you believe it, I know.) I thought of this word game a few weeks ago, but just haven't had a spare moment to post it.
You know I love word games. (Because I'm a female who talks so much and therefore I'm interested in what words mean so I can add them to my arsenal.)

In honor of Game Day in our house, here's the game.
I write out ONE WORD. Whoever happens upon this post next will choose ONE LETTER from my ONE WORD and will write ONE MORE WORD that starts with that ONE LETTER and is somehow RELATED to the previous ONE WORD. Like this...

I write, " W I N T E R"
And my mom comes along, chooses the letter "E" from "winter", and writes "E S K I M O"
Then my not-so-wordy husband sees that and chooses "S" from "Eskimo" and types "S A L M O N"
And so on.

Play as many times as you want. I'm interested to see your brains at work. ;)

Here's my word...

KEYBOARD