the ELLA echo

how we homeschool: game schooling

 

one of the biggest reasons i wanted to homeschool ella is so that "school" would not be awful for her.  :D she has always loved to learn, and i didn't want that love to disappear in a sea of worksheets and textbooks.   i know that most schoolteachers work really hard to make learning fun but what i think what they often miss is that FUN, in and of itself, can actually be educational on it's own.

that is why i lean more and more toward what i call "game schooling".  basically, we play games, and from those games we learn something. :D  but the point has to be the game itself--if there is even a hint of "school" involved, the fun gets sucked right out of it.

these are the games that we've been playing this week:

• shut-the-box (arithmetic, logic, strategy)--thank you lala!
• madlibs (vocabulary, parts of speech)
• scrabble (spelling)--ella got the apple package during our apple study unit
• marbulous (science)--ella calls this "the contraption maker"
• color explosion sheets (art)
• wii fit and wii sports resort (physical fitness)
• view-master cards (reading)

we also make up our own games, such as when we adopt laura but live in her time (history, social studies), or when we rewrite nursery rhymes or fairytales so they include a pie (literature, composition).

there are so many great games to choose from that i truly believe a child could do almost nothing but play games and have fun and still learn just as much, perhaps more, than by doing just "school" alone. that's worth at least 10 bonus points right there.

we're always on the look-out for more games to play so please leave a comment with your suggestions!  

this week in ella news

food:

french fries!!! she LOOOOOOOOOOOOVES them. while we were out running errands, i stopped at long john silvers, i pulled into the parking lot of the shopping center and ate in the car. she kept looking at me and licking her lips, so i gave her a french fry. she took one bite, then she got the confused look on her face she always gets when she tastes something new. but by the end of that bite, she was sure--she loved them and she wanted MORE. i think she ate probably what amounts to a 1/3 of a cup of french fries that day.

yogurt: she loves this too, and fights to get the spoon away from me. yogurt meals require three spoons, one for each of her hands and one for me. she drops one spoon and takes the one i'm holding (the one with the bite on it), and i take the dropped spoon for the next bite. she will eat almost 3 tablespoons of yogart in a sitting. she also found out that dogs love yogurt too, they will happily lick her hands clean when she is done.

she took two TINY bites of roast pork--and didn't care for it, she left the next bite on the tray in favor of some avocado.