Today was math and science day. Today’s picture book was the one above. It has beautiful pictures of real snowflakes and explains everything you ever wanted to know about snowflakes: how they form, the different shapes, and why they look the way they do. 5 out of 5 stars. Simple explanations and the photos of real snowflakes are gorgeous. 5 out of 5 stars!

Then we played Juxtabo, which is all about color and pattern recognition. You build stacks of colored chips to create a pattern on the grid that matches a pattern on your card.  The twist to the game is that the chips have a different color on each side, allowing you to change the colors on the grid. I like that everyone can play at once. Everyone can be looking to find a matching pattern, and call it out. Even then, some of the kids got bored. They gave up too easily and didn’t catch the strategy of looking ahead to win by stacking the chips. The grid changes with every turn as each player has to add chips on every turn. I think it might work better if we had done two groups of four players each instead of one group of 8. We might do it that way next time, and I will emphasize to be looking for patterns even if it’s not your turn and then have a back up plan in case someone messes up your plan.  4 out of 5 stars. Just because the chips slide around easily, especially the higher the stack of chips gets. I wish the manufacturer made them magnetic.

Then we played National Geographic Brain Games. It’s basically a quiz game with four categories: language, vision, logic, and mind and body. On math and science day, I like to just use the vision and logic cards. The vision cards are mostly about optical illusions. We love to engage with them.

Would you like to join us in gameschooling? It’s so fun! Here’s how to build your gameschooling collection on a budget.

Here’s what else we’ve played for our gameschool days.