Games

We use a lot of games for learning here. It seems like a lot of them involve beans or some other tiny thing that can be scattered around the school room by a one year old in under six seconds. Games are a great way to sneak extra practice in on a kid and hearing laughter instead of moaning. It even works on fifth graders!

I picked this magnetic hangman game up in the travel section at Target a while back. Yesterday we used it while we were at the dentist's office. Jack is getting to be a good reader, but his spelling needs a lot of work still. He got in a good twenty minutes of practice making CVC words for me to guess. It turns out those can be pretty tricky to solve. My poor man hung many, many times.

Today we played a compound word game. (I don't know how that pajama collar isn't driving him crazy. I'm twitching just looking at it.)

Each player got to turn over two cards and was trying to build the compound words they had in their pile.

Even Alice liked it.

I downloaded cards for this Chutes and Ladders game from Finally in First, which I found thanks to Amber. The math facts are good review, but Jack also got even more practice with adding and subtracting 10 and 5--and he was surprised to find it didn't work the same way as it does with a 99 or 100 chart!

We recently played The Game of Tens and Ones--printed it off and covered an old die with stickers and we had a good half hour of math practice!

This (sideways) game is from Mailbox magazine. I love their ready-made and easy to make games!

Many of our games come from the fabulous Peggy Kaye books. Tomorrow's reading practice will be from the reading games book!

And of course there are tons of great games you can buy! I picked these two up at Mardel and we'll be giving them a try soon.

What are some of your favorite learning games?