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 ideal for basic math calculations. Playing solitaire helps children to order numbers correctly. My children loved dice games. I roll two dice and add up the number. They roll two dice and add up the number. Who wins? I bought a pair of dice that had Roman numerals to help my children learn to recognize the symbols.
For foreign language I play Concentration with my children using their Spanish vocabulary. I have them write on one blank card the Spanish form of the word, and on another card the English translation for that word. They do this for their whole vocabulary list and then we scramble the cards, place them face down, and they get one turn to look at two cards and see if they are a match. Then I take a turn. Back and forth we go saying the words aloud in Spanish and English to reinforce the auditory learning.
TO MAKE OR BUY?
Most educational games are something you can make with a pack of blank 3x5 cards or some bristol board. Many games like Hangman can be played on a white board. I used a simple game to help my children learn word families called Word Ladder. You draw a ladder, then place a word like Cat on the bottom, with a cartoon of a cat next to it. Then I would draw a cute kitten waiting at the top. They had to supply enough words that are from the "-AT" family to get the kitten down to the cat.
There are some wonderfully fun and relatively inexpensive games you can purchase. I have several decks of themed playing cards (Wonders of the World, Famous Characters of the Old West, Characters from Alice in Wonderland) that can be used for reinforcing concepts. Chess, Scrabble, Backgammon and Monopoly are all classic games that use math, spelling, logic and strategy. As the children progress to Jr. High and High School we have gotten them to play with us such historical recreation games as Civilization, Shogun, Empire Builder and Axis and Allies that involve recreating historical periods and teaches geography as well.
TRUE VALUE
The true value of educational games for homeschooling is that it motivates a child to make the effort to master fundamental educational concepts for the sheer joy of participating in a game with the family. One of my children was being rather lazy about learning to read on his own. He knew the concepts but would much rather let an older sibling read things for him. One night he came in and found the family playing a game with cards that had written instructions on them. "I want to play!" he cried. "Sorry," we told him, "Only people who can read their own cards can play this game. If we read them for you it would spoil the fun. When you start reading, we'll let you play." After we had finished with the game he took the cards off in a corner and spent the evening muttering to himself. By the next day he came back and said, "Let's play, I can read these now." We asked him to prove he could read - and he could! He'll tell you as a teenager today that he learned to read so he could participate in family game night and he learned to count change so he could be the banker!