Using Games

In the past, I was a sucker for any game which could be considered educational. We didn't play them as much as I envisioned myself playing board games or card games with the kids. Nevertheless, I kept picking up interesting-looking games at Goodwill, and now there's quite a stack. I need to clear out some space in this house, and have been sorting through those game piles.

We've been a little short on geography studies recently. So about a month ago, I took a "Carmen Sandiego" game, ditched the playing pieces and the board and instructions, and saved just the stack of trivia cards. We've been using two cards a day (4 questions per card) for geography. Some days it takes a couple of minutes. "Which country is the island of Sicily part of?" "What's the biggest country that touches the Asian part of Russia?" Other days we have to do some serious hunting in the atlas or looking up information in the encyclopedias.

These are multiple-choice questions. Often I avoid giving the kids the options, at least, at first. Today the question was "Which sea (named after a color) is in eastern Europe?" The choices were Black Sea, Red Sea, and Blue Sea. "Black Sea" was easy enough, even prior to their hearing the choices. But we looked at each other. Blue Sea?!!? We all felt like dummies, not having any clue where the Blue Sea was. Then we decided maybe it was a decoy answer. Sure enough, a quick peek in the index of the atlas revealed no such thing as a Blue Sea. Eight of these questions a day sure has given us a lot of geography study in a relatively fun and painless way, in little time segments, with no lesson planning on my part.

I would like to add the cards from some other games too. "Uncommon Sense" and "Hugger Mugger" are word games that come with a box of puzzle-cards. "Tri-Bond" is more well-known, and it would serve a certain child well in learning to see connections between words, learning to problem solve and think outside the box. I bought a game about animals and environments from National Geographic that would have lots of usable science questions in it. The game "Chronology" is about putting historical events in order. All of these sound like they could serve nicely, should we decide to do a few cards a day. This makes use of their educational value much more easily than hauling out a board game that's going to take 1-3 hours to play.