Thursday we do our homeschool co-op on steroids, aka a Commonwealth School or Family Liber School. (Some people call it different names but it’s basically the same thing.) I went out thrifting afterwards in the afternoon/early evening. So we didn’t get home until after dark. It was totally worth it though… see the games below that I snagged:

5 games for $16! The Take Off! cards are missing the world map, but I will adapt. And that’s just half of them. I had to resist the language arts games, such as Guesstures, Taboo, Scene It, Scattergories, etc. as I have a lot of those types, and search for art, music, logic, science, and geography games. I got even more games at two more stops: a new Brain Quest deck quizzing specifically English terms (OK, so I know I said no more language arts games, but I didn’t have any quizz-y language-arts-only games for kids), and more geography and general knowledge games . I’m super excited about Telestrations. I’ve been really wanting that one. The Chameleon is partly language arts-based but it also involves deduction and acting skills so I got it. I’m so excited to play it next week with the kiddos, it looks amazingly fun. It’s from the makers of Bananagrams. More on it next week when we play it for our gameschooling. I’m not sure if we will do it on Monday for language arts, Tuesday for math/logic/deduction day or on Friday for acting. It looks so fun, doesn’t it?

Because it was so late when we got home, we were tired. I thought about my goal of doing a book and a game a day (#abookandagameaday, from thewaldockway.com) and figured I could count the book I listened to my friend Olivia read aloud that morning for Hero Project, the game I played with other moms in my “Moms’ Class” at our liber family school. and the books we listened to in the car as we drove there and back.

The book Miss Olivia read for our first day of Hero Project. It’s a semester-long unit study for teens on the World Wars.

That seemed a bit like a cop-out though. I figured it would be nicer to connect with my children after being gone all day, as we hadn’t talked much in the car and we attend different classes at the school. They hadn’t listened to the book I listened to being read aloud at our family school, we didn’t talk about the book we listened to in the car (Anne of Avonlea, yay!) and I hadn’t played the game with them, but with other moms. I wanted to play something relaxing and not too stressful. That’s a perfect call for a cooperative game. Enter a new game for us, one that showed up in my 13-year-old daughter’s stocking on Christmas Day. My 26-year-old son actually asked for it originally so he got it too. It seemed perfect for her as well because of the art and the idea of mind meld.

It’s called “The Mind.” It’s got 4.5/5 stars on amazon.

Basically you lay down cards from your hand, working together without talking, to make a stack of cards go from 1 to 100. So you get to practice your nonverbal skills and mental telepathy. Fascinating! You get to go through several rounds. If you make a mistake, you can do it over, as you have “lives.”

It’s the perfect game to chill and connect with so you can achieve transcendence over the mundane. What a nice tone to set for the evening! So hygge-ish!

Then I read aloud The Snowy Day to my 10 year old. The perfect ending for a winter’s day!