Where do I start? We love games around here. Actually, to be more accurate, Wombat Girl LOVES board games and Video Boy...well, have a little guess about what he loves (ahh - but I see that is a post for another day!).
Have a read of some of the Australian Curriculum guff about proficiencies and then have a look at the games we love and see if you can make some connections:
- Students make connections between related concepts and progressively apply the familiar to develop new ideas.
- Students develop skills in choosing appropriate procedures, carrying out procedures flexibly, accurately, efficiently and appropriately, and recalling factual knowledge and concepts readily.
- Students develop the ability to make choices, interpret, formulate, model and investigate problem situations, and communicate solutions effectively.
- Students formulate and solve problems when they use mathematics to represent unfamiliar or meaningful situations, when they design investigations and plan their approaches, when they apply their existing strategies to seek solutions, and when they verify that their answers are reasonable.
- Students develop an increasingly sophisticated capacity for logical thought and actions, such as analysing, proving, evaluating, explaining, inferring, justifying and generalising.
Apart from all that goodliness, given that my kids don't participate in team sports (or really any kinds of sports...apart from family fitness), games give us the chance to practice that all important "socialisation" that everyone keeps asking about. We play games as a family, an extended family, with the kid's friends and with our friends (just ask anyone who has to endure Buzz music trivia after a night at our house!).
Games also teach:
- conversational skills
- how to take turns
- patience
- concentration and focus
- planning ahead
- strategy
- listening skills
- sometimes adding, multiplying, spelling, vocabulary
- how to win nicely
- how to lose nicely
- persistence
- how to pretend you are having fun, when you aren't (oh, wait - that's just me and Monopoly!)
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| And the real version (I deserve Bonus Homeschool Mum points!) |
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| Card games... |
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| Poker |
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| More poker |
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| Snap! |
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| Chess |
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| Jenga (regular and super-sized!) |
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| Electronic (and pen and paper) Sudoku |
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Jigsaws - many and assorted!
If you like hard ones, the Escher Sphere is a doozy... |
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| And sometimes we even create out own! |
And there are
many, many more on my wish list!!! Yep, we love games around here!
Very timely...my kids are playing Banangrams right at this moment :) We too love games. You have a few games I haven't seen before, so I'll look them up. Do you have a favourite supplier? Online perhaps? As we are in a rural area I usually have to order them online. Target Country doesn't have much of a selection :(
ReplyDeleteHey April - I feel your pain! We only just got Country Target here...and well, mmm. I totally love Games Paradise (http://www.gamesparadise.com.au/) or if all else fails, Amazon.
DeleteExcellent!
ReplyDeleteAnd I've been thinking that I need to teach mine poker... I'm pretty sure that I learned to play penny poker with my cousins at around age seven or so! :)
We taught the kids to play poker on our first cruise - we played for pretzels in the bar!!! Looked hysterical!
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