We do a fair bit of gameschooling (learning through games). One Rae really likes is Sushi Go – it’s fairly quick and easy to play but my favorite part is the different kinds of math that go into calculating the score. Sneaky (and fun!) learning at it’s finest. If you’re interested I have a list of most of the games we own/play here.
The Need for Speed via Dutch Blitz
If you didn’t grow up playing Dutch Blitz you missed out and I highly recommend you grab a deck of cards to play with your kids. This is one of those games that has so many educational benefits and kids don’t even notice! The game is a simple concept, you are basically building piles of cards from 1 through to 10 but there is a speed factor and a few piles you are grabbing cards from plus if you keep score (which we don’t do when the kids are just learning) concepts like multiplication, addition and negative numbers come into play. So much learning while having a “vonderful goot” time.
Learning with Money
This morning Raeca took down our jar of various currencies from our trips. She started asking questions and we ended up talking about different currencies, the countries the coins came from and who visited those countries and when. We admired the different types of currency, the images on them and even the different shapes (the Eastern Caribbean States coins win that prize for uniqueness!). Then she had the idea of separating the currency into their country of origin: And then after that we wrote down the variety of different coins we have, how many of them and then using some addition, skip counting and multiplication we figured out…
Math at Breakfast
Breakfast this morning suddenly turned into learning double digit addition (no carrying yet) for Mister Five. He’s really excited to be able to add up to 99! He has just a simple composition notebook that has room for a drawing or something on the top half and lines on the bottom half. I love pulling this notebook out in times like this because it’s fun to look back on and see what we’ve learned at the end of the year. (It also helps our homeschool portfolio when it comes to reporting to our school division.)
