Playing Games and Taking Time to Breathe

 

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

~John Donne

I’ve said that our lives are continuing as usual in this pandemic, and that’s partly true. There is no reason for our lives to be affected. We have the curriculum and lesson plans in place to homeschool. Shopping is difficult enough that we keep our pantry well stocked so we don’t have to do it often. We are concerned but not panicked.

Yet things aren’t the same. It’s as if the world around me is hyperventilating and I’m holding my breath, waiting to breathe properly again. Many around us find their world off-kilter, and I’m off balance, trying to keep my footing.

The crisis that has not touched us has affected our whole family.

Perhaps it’s because, as John Donne says in the piece above, “…any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.”

And perhaps it’s because every time I look at the news or turn on social media, I am reminded. Every time my children ask if we’re going anywhere today, and I say, “No.”

“Why?”

“Because everything is cancelled.”

Yesterday I could feel some tension getting to me. I could feel my children getting restless. So I decided to ditch the curriculum for the day and play games instead.

Did you know you can do that if you homeschool?

A few years ago I dipped a toe into gameschooling. Yes, it’s a thing. I even wrote a blog post about it. Over time, though, the games slipped away. I was too tired. Life was too serious. Chores were too many.

This week, though, I woke up to the idea that we need to come together as a family. One way to do that is to play games together (and if the kiddos are learning, so much the better).

My husband and I have been wanting Catan for years. This past Christmas, we finally got it for ourselves. We were so excited. It has sat unused since then. Monday we pulled it out and played it as a family. The kids were up two hours past their bedtime (except the youngest, she crashed). We were enjoying playing a game as a family too much to let it go.

Settlers of Catan with the family.

Yesterday, I went through our game cupboard and pulled out half a dozen games that could also be considered educational. We played this spiral math game, which only required a deck of cards, some teddy bear counters, and a pair of dice I swiped from Risk. From there we moved on to games like Diggers Garden Patch (math) and the Scrambled States of America (U.S. geography—there’s also a book). When it comes to educational games, SimplyFun and Gamewright are two of my favorite companies.

Playing the spiral math game. I like it because it can be tailored to each child's level of math learning--addition for my first grader and more complicated operations for the older students.

It was like stopping to take a breath.

We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled curriculum today, but maybe we’ll also find time for Rummy Roots (reading and vocabulary) or multiplication wars. I’ll also make time to bake sourdough bread—and remember to breathe.