Putting the Play Back in School

It was a gameschool day.

I first heard that term on Caitlin Curley’s blog, My Little Poppies, a couple of years ago. It was a drab, post-Christmas, winter day. My oldest and I had been stuck in a schooling rut all fall. School was a painful daily grind. More often than not, it involved tears. The idea of learning through games broke into my mind like a laser through smoke (probably smoke from burning textbooks).

I wasn’t ready to completely abandon curriculum and worksheets in favor of games and books as some homeschool families do, but I was determined to make learning fun again. So, I joined Caitlin's January gameschool challenge that year. I perused posts by other gameschoolers and integrated games into our daily life. I bought games until I ran out of storage and money, and still my Amazon wish list of games grew exponentially every day. (It’s still a little out of control, to be honest.) My kids were loving it. I grabbed the gameschool challenge and met it.

For a while.

Over time, the tension of trying to keep preschoolers on track during games and promote good sportsmanship created its own kind of stress. Finally, by spring, it just kind of…fizzled…out. The games went back into the cupboard and stayed there, and we went back to our worksheets.

Lately, though, the games have been creeping back out. My children are two years older. Even the five-year-old can follow simple rules and be a good sport about losing. (And have you ever heard a five-year-old girl try to trash talk over cards? “You’re going down...down to da gwound!” she says. It’s adorable.) We’ve been meeting with another homeschool family to learn through games twice a month. My husband and I are discovering the joy of sitting down and playing board games with our children in the evening. That stack of games is being used so often, it never quite gets put away.

That brings us to today. Today was windy. It was cloudy. It was cold. Despite the blooming tulips, it didn’t feel like April. So, when my older two took the dog out for a morning constitutional and my youngest approached me with There’s a Moose in the House, I said yes.

Have I not mentioned the dog before? That’s because Teeny is a new addition, an early birthday present for our oldest.

As we played, I thought, Whatever happened to gameschooling? Why don’t we do this more? I still wasn’t ready to toss the day’s lesson plan out the window, though, so we set the game aside when the older two came in. I settled them down with a morning snack while we read a Bible story and Life of Fred: Edgewood. Lo and behold! Life of Fred mentioned played the addition game.

Sums of ten. Math war. I forgot all about those, I thought. When the chapter ended, I set aside the textbooks and pulled out a deck of Paw Patrol playing cards. My oldest and I played the sums of ten game and addition war. Then I gave them a break while I searched for Boggle Jr.. Oh, yes, we played Boggle.

A morning of math-themed card games and Boggle Jr.

During lunch, they talked me into a couple of episodes of Science Max: Experiments at Large. They have watched, as far as I know, every episode available on YouTube, but that doesn’t stop them from wanting more.

After lunch, my son made tinfoil boats, and then they broke our pasta bridge by overloading it.

Looking for a pattern match in Digger's Garden Match.

After that, we sat down with tea and Digger’s Garden Match. It’s a matching and counting game, and I love it because it’s so flexible to each child’s level--the littlest players can make simple matches while my oldest stretched herself to look for complex patterns. In between their turns, the kiddos made dragons out of paper. When the game was over, they played with their dragons; when I offered to play Scrambled States of America with my eldest, she graciously declined, implying that perhaps she’d been sitting and playing games too long.

Tomorrow, we’ll go back to our lesson plans and workbooks. Grammar must get done, and there’s more to math than single-digit addition. But today was such a nice break from stress and tedium.  Learning under the guise of play is so much lovelier than flash cards. My vision seems wider. I feel a familiar itch to go browse Amazon.

Forbidden Island looks fun. My daughter agrees.

There’s Poor, and Then There’s Poor

I’ve been thinking a lot about poverty lately.

When I left my job last fall to stay at home and homeschool our children, we knew it would be difficult. Modern America isn’t friendly to a family of five trying to live on one modest income. That’s why, when I determined to read biographies with my children this year, I decided to begin with George Mueller, “A man who trusted God for everything,” as VeggieTales puts it. Because I knew we were going to have to trust God—a lot.

I’m not saying we’re poor, not really. When you look at poverty on a global scale, our little family is unbelievably rich. We have a home, means to heat and cool it, and no lack of food or clothing. We have things we don’t even need, like cell phones and Netflix. But again, Modern America. We live in a materialistic society, and aside from the normal struggles to make ends meet, it can be difficult to shrug off the need to keep up with those pesky Joneses. It’s difficult to shake off feelings of jealousy or pride when you see neighbors and friends with new cars, while you’re pouring gas into your carburetor and wondering where you’ll get the money for something that runs. In a thousand ways, our culture—Christian and secular alike, quite often—judges us according to our finances or lack thereof.

That’s why I’m thankful when God plants little lessons in our lives. Last night, when I was reading George MacDonald’s classic, The Princess and Curdie, with my oldest, I was stuck by this passage, when the old Princess is speaking to Curdie’s father.

"Yes," she went on, "you have got to thank me that you are so poor, Peter. I have seen to that, and it has done well for both you and me, my friend. Things come to the poor that can’t get in at the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter – one that no man covets, and but a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it is a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that, like other privileges, may be terribly misused."

It struck me so much, I shared it on Facebook. It didn’t get many likes. But what I left out of that Facebook post was the next line—

“Had you been rich, my Peter, you would not have been so good as some rich men I know.” (Emphasis mine.)

Those words, written more than a century ago by the man C.S. Lewis regarded as his master, might seem enough of a lesson. However, some 12 hours later, I picked up our latest biography to read with my children, Milton Hershey: More than Chocolate, by Janet and Geoff Benge. In today’s chapter, Hershey’s words to his wife, Kitty, leaped off the page at me.

“Besides, I can’t see what happiness a rich man gets from continually acquiring things and not giving any of it away. After all, what’s the point of money unless you use it for the good of the community and humanity in general?”

Two years later, the Hersheys had an orphanage up and running near Hershey, Penn. It seems Milton Hershey may have been a good rich man, blessed with the burden of wealth rather than the privilege of poverty.

George Mueller had a vision to help the orphans of Bristol, but no money. Through prayer, God gave him the means to help thousands of children, though Mueller himself died virtually penniless.

Milton Hershey had money but didn’t want to die rich, and so sought out a way to use his millions for the good of those around him.

As I look at those two men, I see the privilege of poverty and the responsibility of wealth, both accepted in a certain poorness of spirit—which paradoxically is itself a kind of wealth. Because there is more than one kind of poverty.

If I go through a season of poverty or semi-poverty, I may not understand why. It may be a time of learning or refining. It’s all kinds of humbling to think it may be because I wouldn’t be as good as some rich women God knows.

Regardless, my prayer doesn’t become, “God, please make me rich,” or “God, please keep me poor.” Rather, I would pray to be “poor in spirit,” (Matt. 5:3) and learn the lesson St. Paul learned long before my time, or Milton Hershey’s time, or George Mueller’s time.

“Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:11-13, ESV).