games for math

A good friend of mine let me borrow one of her books the other day...

Games for Math

It is such a cool little book! I have acquired quite a collection of math game books but haven't really loved any of them. Then my friend let me borrow this one. First of all, it does not require a collection of fancy materials to make the games work. And for the most part, there is no prep.

I decided to try out our first game yesterday. Clara and I played in the morning and she enjoyed it so much that she wanted to teach Alex how to play that afternoon.


Basically, each child rolled the die twice. On the first roll, they made that many big circles on their card. On their second roll, they made that many items inside each big circle.

Then we wrote out the problem two ways...
First as an addition problem, then as a multiplication problem.

So, in the case of Clara's pink card at the bottom...on her first roll she got a six, so she made six big circles. Her second roll, she got a two, so she made two little circles inside each big circle.

Since we were only concerned about the little circles, her addition equation looked like this:

2+2+2+2+2+2=12

and her multiplication equation looked like this:

2x6=12

She didn't actual "do" the multiplication. We worked more on the concept of how to set up the equation and seeing the relationship between it and the addition equation.

Oh... back to the game... whoever had the highest answer on their card got to keep both cards. In the end, the person with the most cards won. I'm not sure if that was how it was outlined in the book but that's how it ended up at our house. The kids love to play war so they just treated it like a different version of that game.

I can't wait to try more of the games from this book!

experimenting...

Our homeschool is an ever evolving beast. :-)

I had a homeschooling epiphany the other day (which I'll expand on later) so we're trying some new stuff this week.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.... I struggle with language arts (LA). It was never my strength growing up.... I was more into math and science. Anyway, because of this I have been all over the board with language arts... I have completely ignored it (not the best solution), bought workbooks and curriculum to do it for me and now I'm finally trying a mix - using curriculum in our own way. We're taking the books and going off road. :-)

So, Clara has really been struggling with LA because she struggles with handwriting. She also isn't particularly the sit at the table and do a workbook type (well, at least not for too long). So, I decided over the weekend that I would try typing up and printing out some of the exercises from their LA books. I decided to try this because I really felt that she did get more of the concepts than it appeared when she had to write things out.

So, here's day one...
I decided to use the grade 2 Rod and Staff grammar book I had bought for Alex last year. To start I just typed out some sentences from the book, cut the words apart and let her arrange them back into sentences.... looking for clues to help (capital letters and punctuation). She really enjoyed that. The next section was about sentences versus phrases.... so I typed up their list of each along with the headings "sentence" and "phrase", cut them out and let her put them in the proper columns. Again... fun and quick. Finally, so she can keep working on her handwriting, I typed out a few of the sentences in StartWrite for her to trace and then copy.

Here's Alex's...
He's working in book 3. We haven't gotten very far into it. We stopped for a while when he got into his daily paragraph editing work sheets. Thankfully though, we had stopped right before a review section.

Here he is sorting sentences into columns of "commanding", "telling" and "asking" sentences...
Now, he's cutting up those same sentences in order to separate them into columns of "subjects" and "predicates"....
He had always tolerated his Rod and Staff grammar (once we stopped writing everything out)... but this was the first time that he really got into it and seemed to enjoy it. Figuring he could always use some extra handwriting practice... I did the same for him as I had done for Clara.

After our LA work, it was time for a spelling game...

Snap It Up! Phonics and Reading Card Game, Word Families

I was the referee and the official middle card turner over person. It was a good learning game for Clara and a good review game for Alex. They enjoyed it enough that they think we should get the Snap It Up gamesin all varieties. :-)

I also wanted to show off this little beauty...

My very own Automatic Playing Card Shuffler!! I'm terrible at shuffling cards and so many of the kids' games involve shuffling cards.... I actually used to avoid playing card games with them... but NO MORE!!! :-)

After the traditional round of Snap It Up, we split the ending cards between the two of them and also split the beginning cards.... they then tried to be the first one done with forming words with all of their endings...
It was a good experiment!! However, since it's a little more labor intensive for me, I'm hoping I can keep at it.

let the games begin!

One of my goals for the new year is to get back to playing more games for school. I used to be so good about this with Alex, but I fell off the wagon a bit when it came to Clara.

Since Clara can always use some extra help with spelling, we got out this game yesterday....

What's Gnu?

It was fun.... but I learned quickly that we couldn't play it the traditional way (2 player).... Alex was just too fast. So for the second round, Clara went alone...
and she got different points for her words depending on the level of help she needed. Alex kept track of it all on the easel. We had a really good time playing together and I look forward to making games a bigger part of our school.

totally gross

Totally Gross Game

Apparently we play a lot of games.... lol! Clara got Alex this game for Christmas (however, the one he got is the mini version, it was about half the price of the one linked to and fits into a small tin... it doesn't include the "lab cards" mentioned or the slime... hmmm... we could be missing out on something fun here).

Okay... we played the game today as our post-lunch, pre-getting back to the books activity. For my kids (ages 6 and 7) it works best for me to be "keeper of the cards" and do all of the reading. So they rolled the die and answered the questions but I got to sit in the comfy chair and read cards. The questions range from intriguing to totally gross. Alex thought they were hilarious since most of them had to do with bodily functions (a lot of "poop" questions and even one about what would happen to you if you peed on an electric fence). Most of them seemed to have a decent scientific explanation to go with the answer. There was one evolution related question about eyebrows (did they have a purpose or were they just left over from when we evolved from apes?). Being the reader of the cards, I got to edit that one and just left it as "do eyebrows have a purpose?".

I can't believe I totally forgot the Gross Out cards. If you land on certain spaces you get to draw a "gross out" card and if you do the activity listed you get to move another space. So far we haven't gotten anything too terribly gross. Today, only Alex landed on a gross out space and all he had to do was blink as many times as he could in 20 seconds. However, the other one on the card was to "groom" the person sitting next to you. Nothing my kids think twice about doing... however, in a year or two in a mixed group of friends, they might seem more of a "gross out".

I'm not sure I could totally count playing this game as a school activity... but its a fun game that the kids enjoy that does have some redeeming educational qualities.

another game review...

Money Bags Game

The kids LOVE this game! They played it over and over the other day. As you travel around the board you get paid for doing different chores. You collect your money from the bank... but before you do, you spin the arrow. It will point to a space that may let you use all coins or will not allow you to use certain coins. For example... you could earn $.22 for your chore, but the spinner lands on no dimes.... so now you're using nickels to get your pay. It works great for my kids who sometimes get stuck in their comfort zone with certain coins. Clara leans towards dimes because she can count better by tens than by fives... with the spinner, she's forced out of this habit at times.

The math curriculum we use doesn't spend a whole lot of time on money, so this has been a fun way to work on that skill.

a couple of games...

Yesterday we took some time out of our day to play a couple of "school games".

The first game we played was Great States Jr..
The kids LOVE this game. It is very easy for all of us to play together. When you roll you land on one of three colors and pull a card of matching color. One color is about state names, so for example you may be looking for 3 states that start with N. Another color is state shapes, they show just the shape of the state and you need to find it on the board. And the final color is state pictures (I'm not sure exactly what they call it), each state has a symbol on it referencing something that it is famous for. The card tells the fact and shows the picture, then you have to find the state on the map. The game is great for Clara (age 6) but, even though he enjoys it, Alex is beyond this one. This game is geared toward non-readers and if they are readers, I wouldn't recommend it. Here's my beef with it... they list the answers on the FRONT of each card! Yes, they are in small print and upside down but now that Alex knows that they're there and how to read them, there's no going back. Maybe if you want to play this game with a reader, someone other than the person who's turn it is should draw and read the card (the answer is easily covered with a thumb). The instructions have each person drawing their own card so we've played that way for a while now. Its hard to change the rules now.


The second game we played was Sight Word Bingo. Nothing terribly unique about this game, but the kids enjoy it. Yesterday they added to the challenge by having some of their stuffed animals play too. So between the two of them they were managing about 13 cards. I like that this set has a chart of all of the words. This helps Alex with the concept of alphabetization.