bbcovert@juno.com

Many homeschoolers, and I am certainly one of them, collect educational games. There are games based on math, language arts, science, history, geography, and the Bible. It’s easy to fill a cabinet or closet with games. The question is: are you making good use of them? They’re not just for weekend entertainment!

A few years ago a friend told me that she counted playing educational games as school time. It hadn’t occurred to me, but traditional schools do play games in the classroom. Students look forward to those games! I faintly remember playing “Giant” in class, and it had something to do with answering questions and moving to the head of the row. I also remember spelling baseball, where each correctly spelled word moved the student around the bases in the classroom. Of course, being an excellent speller, I enjoyed spelling bees too. Good times, good times...

Our homeschooled students deserve to have fun learning too, and we’re just the moms and dads to provide the fun! We can easily incorporate a game into each week. Perhaps you will schedule a game one day after the lessons are completed. You might arrange the lessons in such a way that one day can become Game Day. We had Game Day on Fridays. On that day, I would pull out 3 or 4 different games. You can call it education with big smiles!

All kinds of games are good for Game Day. There are board games, card games, computer games, and activity games. Over the years, I collected a variety of board and card games. I would buy at least one new game each year. We started with the classic Hi-Ho Cherry-o in kindergarten and worked our way up to the National Geographic Global Pursuit game. Aristoplay makes some good educational games; Quick Pix games teach math, money, geography, and animal categories (science). I have all five of those card games. Ampersand Press has some excellent science games; Into the Forest, Onto the Desert, and Krill teach students about the various food chains. Out of the Box offers Apples to Apples and Apples to Apples Junior for a fun time with language arts. They have many other intriguing games that might interest you as well. Many of the “old” games also provide educational benefits. Not only Scrabble and Hi-Ho Cherry-o, but other familiar games like Monopoly and Life could easily round out a Game Day. Mad Libs is a fun way to practice grammar; students have to know what nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are to complete the stories. For the youngest students, Candyland, with its many colored spaces, is a good choice.

For Bible study, I must recommend Dr. Dale Simpson’s A Study in Wisdom. It’s a 6-week study from Proverbs for K-5th grade, and includes coloring pages. Best of all, you can get it with a board game which reinforces the lessons from Proverbs! Your kids will need to complete the study first and have verses memorized before they will be able to enjoy the game.

There are many, many good games out there. If you’re on a tight budget, you may find some affordable ones on eBay, at consignment stores, or at yard sales. You might even make your own.

If you don’t have time to supervise a board or card game, the next option is a computer game. Kids scarcely notice how educational these can be! You have the Jump-Start series, the Clue Finders series, and the Blaster series, among others. Your child can get a good workout in reading, language arts, history, science, and math in just one computer game! If you have more than one student, you’ll either need more than one computer or a timer set so that they can take turns fairly. There have been times when I’ve had an important project to finish for my work-at-home job, and I’ve had the kids play computer games so that we could count the day as a school day while I finished my project. Flexibility is one of my favorite benefits that comes from the homeschooling lifestyle!

The last type of game is the activity game. This kind of game requires full body participation. For instance, something as simple as tossing a beanbag back and forth while reciting the alphabet would count for young children. You could turn Simon Says into an educational game with commands such as “Simon says to run in place while counting by two’s to twenty!” I once made a life-size Candyland game by placing colored construction paper on the floor and having the students act as the game pieces. I took candy wrappers and cut them in half. One half was taped to a floor “tile” and the other was taped to a 3 x 5 card. Other 3 x 5 cards had squares of construction paper glued to them. The first person to the end of the path won a piece of candy!

If the daily grind of homeschooling has become stressful for at least one of you, perk yourselves up by tossing aside the textbooks for some game time! This should cut down on the whining. As a bonus, you won’t have any papers to grade at the end of the day! 

Happy homeschooling!

Copyright 2006 by Brenda B. Covert