by Sandra Devera

Created on: May 19, 2008

One of the great advantages to homeschooling is the ability to use educational games to reinforce learning to a greater degree than can be used in a traditional classroom with 30 children wanting their "turn" at the game. The value of educational games in homeschooling is that you can take learning concepts for math, reading comprehension, terminology review, and foreign language and put them into formats that will appeal to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.

BODIES IN MOTION

Some children are just too "wiggly" to sit at a desk and learn something written on a board or spoken by a teacher. In the movie Akeelah and the Bee, the main character prepares for a national spelling competition by jumping rope as she practices spelling the competition words. She is a kinetic learner and needs to do something with her body for her brain to process the information into long-term memory.

In homeschooling you can make up physical games to reinforce any subject matter. Draw numbers with a piece of chalk on the driveway and as you call out math problems have your child jump onto the answer. Play duck-duck-goose asking a question and the person who is tapped and chase you can only tag you out if they know the correct answer. That use of a jump rope for spelling is an idea that works!

IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION, PLEASE

Playing your own form of Jeopardy is an entertaining way to test at the end of a unit. Let's say you've been studying the American Civil War. Create six categories of questions (Famous Battles, War Heroes, Authors, North and South, Ladies, Abolitionists) and come up with questions ranging from easy to difficult. You can even have questions prepared for each child in the homeschool appropriate to their level. You can play for anything from pennies to peanuts, just so that the children get a tangible reward for the number of correct responses. You can review science, world geography, or a novel using an educational trivia game. Take an old Trivial Pursuit game and come up with your own cards and categories and let children go for their pieces of the pie!

MANIPULATIVES

Lots of math programs swear by manipulatives - the idea that if you handle "numbers" of things you'll understand the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Card games are a fun and inexpensive way to exchange things, giving and taking away, as in "Go Fish." Not only are children learning to match but they are counting how many sets they have compared to you! Playing 21 is

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