How to Include Games in Home school

"Hi, I’m Sharon Wilharm on behalf of ExpertVillage.com. And now I’d like to talk about games and how they relate to your home school experience. Games are wonderful, in fact, I’ve written a book called “Laid Back Learning” that is just chopped full of games and how to use them to teach. Now first off, car games, if you’re like any home schooler I know, you spend a lot of time in your car and it’s a great way to learn. You can play I Spy, you can look at car tags and have them looking for cars from the various states, which can tie into geography. It’s amazing when you start thinking of how many things you can do in the car that will teach. Also board games, you can use your traditional games like Scrabble or Monopoly and of course these are teaching spelling and learning and adding and subtracting and all of those wonderful things and you can make your own. Get a piece of construction paper, draw a little board on it, make up your cards to study for whatever test that you have upcoming and kids love it, it doesn’t take much just some construction paper and buttons and you’ve got a wonderful game. Card games such as UNO and Solitaire, they’re teaching thinking skills. Now our favorite at our house was baseball and this is where you had to answer a question and you got to work your way through the bases. And that’s a lot of fun and it can be done with all the kids in your family, it can be done if you have an only child. Another way is with tic-tac-toe, if you answer the question correctly, you get to put an X or an O. and so games are a great encouragement for children and they love them and they don’t even realize that they’re learning, so try to incorporate some games into your home schooling."