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.