Here’s what we did for #abookandagameaday on Thurs. 1/30/20…
On Thursdays we drive 90 minutes one way to participate with other homeschoolers in a co-operative type school run by homeschooling moms. At this co-op, I teach a Hero Project class on the World Wars. In that class, we read aloud the poppy poem for World War 1 written by John McCrae. Then we listened to this book, above, about a woman who wanted to give tributes to WW1 veterans by giving them poppies. See video below.
Then we played the Chameleon card game to facilitate a discussion of The Faithful Spy, a graphic novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We played the game the day before with my kids and some friends, and then we got to play it with my Hero class. I was so excited to pair it with The Faithful Spy! The book is so amazing, about such an amazing man! You’ve got to read it! My favorite part of the whole story is how he had a dream at the end, about Jesus, that was such a gift to give hope as his life was ending in prison. My second favorite part is how it was visits from his beautiful sweetheart, Maria, in prison, that also gave him hope that he had life beyond what the Nazis were doing to him. Such is the power of the love of a good woman!
I made new topic cards for the game, with all the topics coming from Bonhoeffer’s life, as mentioned in the book. Then I asked discussion questions in-between game rounds, mostly from this study guide over here. I tied the questions into the study guide. The Chameleon game was perfect to use because Bonhoeffer had to be a “chameleon” and appear to have allegiance to Hitler, in order to blend in as a double agent spy and take part in the plot to assassinate the evil tyrant.
Today was History/Geography Day for our 2020 #abookagameaday gameschooling challenge. So we did the above book, featuring the backstory of the Star-spangled Banner. Because of this book, I understand how the Star-Spangled Banner came to be. I already knew about Francis Scott Key and Dr. Beanes, from a different picture book, but I didn’t fully understand why they were being held captive through a battle, and why Francis Scott Key was a patriot until I read this book.
I found it used years ago at a thrift store and got it for my little boy’s birthday. (Through the years I’ve attempted to always get a book for a child’s birthday present in addition to a fancier, more wanted gift, to send the message that I highly value books. Just to make sure they know, LOL! I haven’t always been able to afford a brand new book but I can always scrape together enough money to get a used one.)
When I was a kid my grade school had the whole set of these “PowerTales” books with the accompanying cassette tapes. We were allowed to listen to/read them during our lunch break in the “Media Center” with clunky headphones. It’s fun how each real-life person chronicled in each book has some little sidekick/gadget/animal who narrates the story. What great memories! Years ago, my mom got some great deal on the companion “ValueTales” series and bought a set for each of her children to benefit the grandchildren. While I don’t love the cartoonish drawings, I do adore the stories, and that each one shows a value lived out without being overly preachy. We will be reading these each Wednesday this semester. They are long though so we will break each one up into two days’ readings. These books are out of print but you can scout them out at yard sales, thrift and online stores. They are worth finding and reading over and over! 4 1/2 out of 5 stars, just because of the too-cartoonish drawings.
For our games, we played the following, as requested by one of our January birthday girls:
First Chameleon. This is such a fun game! It doubles as a great party game as well as an educational game.
You can adapt it to discuss any kind of theme involved with any class you are teaching by making your own topic cards that relate to your theme(s). So tomorrow, I am using it in my Hero Project class when we discuss The Faithful Spy, a graphic novel about the German Christian theologian-turned-spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer. What good fortune I have! I picked it up in practically new condition from a thrift store for $4 in November. It’s the perfect game about spying, because in this game, “chameleon” is synonymous with “spy.” So I am making topic cards using keywords and phrases from Faithful Spy, and interspersing discussion questions to ask between rounds of play. It should be so much fun and meaningful as well! I can’t wait! Bonhoeffer had to be a chameleon in his efforts to foil Hitler, for sure! One of the pages in the book shows him saluting Hitler, when in reality, he was a double agent who did not like Hilter and was working to get him assassinated.
I give the game 5 out of 5 stars. It’s for 3 to 8 players. So I love that it can be for a big group.
Then we broke up the group to play some two-player games. The birthday girl chose checkers. So because we couldn’t all play checkers, some of us played Bananagrams, some tic-tac-toe, and I got to play Chick-a-Pig with my little guy. I discovered this game from a friend at church. She loaned it to me and my little guy liked it so much I got it for his “fancy” gift for Christmas. We played it a ton on Thanksgiving Day. After many times of him beating me, over the past two months since knowing about it, I finally learned his tactics. Using them against him today, I won! This is such a clever game. I love that it combines elements of chess, soccer, and pinball with a farming theme. Very fun! It’s a 2 to 4 player game. 5 out of 5 stars. It’s extra cool that it was developed by the guitarist Dave Matthews. It teaches strategy and looking ahead (vision), as well as sportsmanship for when you consistently get low rolls of the die. That happened to my son today, while I got several high rolls of the die. That definitely helped me win.
Here’s how to make the easiest birthday “cake” ever. It’s total, 100% ice cream (with whipped cream frosting) in the shape of a round, two layer cake.
You can use whatever ice cream/frozen dessert recipe you want. So that allows you to customize it for your dietary needs, whether they be dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, etc. You will need frozen dessert and two round cake layer pans. Go here to get my favorite frozen dessert recipes, mostly ice cream, some sorbet, sherbet, and frozen yogurt. If you want this cake to be the easiest ever, then just buy from the store. If you are going homemade, make the ice cream the day before the party so it has time to firm up.
Here’s how to assemble, several hours before the party:
Get your favorite frozen dessert. Either buy from the store or make your own the day before. You will need a gallon of it, either two half-gallons, one each of different flavors, or one gallon of the same flavor.
Soften the frozen dessert so it is scoopable by leaving it out for 5-10 minutes. Then use a rubber scraper to scoop it out and form it into a round cake layer pan. Then put the other half-gallon frozen dessert into the other pan.
Put the two pans into the freezer to refreeze for a few hours.
An hour before you want to serve the dessert, take out the pans. Let them sit for a few minutes to soften, and carefully loosen the edges with a butter knife and tap the frozen dessert out onto a cake pedestal or serving tray/dish. Put whipped cream frosting on the bottom layer if desired, then top the bottom layer with the second layer.
Frost more if desired, Put back into the freezer until ready to light the candles and sing.
Top with candles (work quickly because the ice cream is melting!) and/or sign. The sign in the picture above is a Pioneer Woman sign from Walmart. The pedestal is also Pioneer Woman brand from Walmart, both from the party supplies aisle.
Add a board game like Dixit, below, family and/or friends, and you have an instant party! Enjoy!
I’m excited to announce that I will be speaking at the Winter Homeschool Conference on Saturday, February 8 in Layton, Utah. Come join over 1000 people at this fabulous event! I will be talking about three topics:
Family Finances without Tears and Stress: marriage, kids, and personality differences.
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.
Oh how I love the above book! We read it today for our #abookagameaday challenge from thewaldockway.com. I love how the central message is the power of mother love, and the reciprocal love a child has for her mother. So tremendously transcendant! Dear William Steig must have genuinely loved his family. This book and his Sylvester and the Magic Pebble exude family togetherness.
We had a birthday girl in our midst today so we played games she chose to help celebrate the occasion. Here’s what we did:
Have I mentioned before how much I love Bananagrams? Yes! Great taste, girlfriend! 5 out of 5 stars! So much better than Scrabble! We allow abbreviations in our games, hence “P.E.” in the winning grid below. Sorry about the confusing background, I keep maps and US state flashcards under my plastic tablecloth. (You know us homeschoolers, always wanting to capitalize on a captive audience around a table!)
Then Whoonu by Cranium. It’s $64 on Amazon! Maybe I will sell my copy! I got it free when a Veggie Gal girlfriend moved to Oregon and dejunked. “Whoonu” it would get so much loving play out of it years later? This is the third time we’ve played it in a month. The girls especially love it. I guess it’s out of print so the price is high. It’s such a great “getting-to-know-you” game. You get to learn what every player’s favorite things are with guessing cards and a secret envelope. Such a clever concept. It’s great because kids who don’t do well at trivia/academic knowledge quiz games still have a fighting chance at this one. 5 out of 5 stars.
Then Reverse Charades. This one is fast becoming the kiddos’ favorite. We have played it two days in a row for gameschooling. The kids get so intense. You have two teams and then one person on each team has to guess the word while the other teammates act it out. I love seeing their creativity to act it out and then see them succeed at guessing, especially when the cluewords are obscure but they still get it. I bought the game for $4 while thrifting in Tucson two weeks ago. Such a great bargain for so many laughs and connection to boot! 5 out of 5 stars.
I love this talk over here that President/Elder M. Russell Ballard gave last December at BYUI for its commencement. The video above is from the same trip he refers to in the talk, I am guessing. He talks about how the Lord guided the founding of America. It totally piggybacks on last week’s Come, Follow Me reading that included 1 Nephi 13, where Nephi saw in vision the colonizing of America and the Revolutionary War.
In hindsight, we can see that those things happened to prepare the way for the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This month’s Ensign magazine has an extensive article right here about the same topic by Elder Ballard. He speaks about God guiding Joseph Smith’s family and then asks us to look for God’s hand in our own lives.
As we consider how the Lord’s hand was manifested in the lives of the Smith family, we need to recognize that His hand is also manifested in each of our lives. Looking for the hand of the Lord in our lives takes spiritual sensitivity and, in many cases, time and perspective. Fortunately, patriarchal blessings, personal journals, and personal life histories can provide a lens to see how the Lord’s hand is manifest in our lives.
Yes! I agree! It’s so important to keep journals and go back and read them too! Doing so brings so much peace and joy to my life, helping me make sense out of what sometimes seems like chaos.
Below is a companion speech by David Barton, who shows that the American Founding Fathers were overwhelmingly Christian.
Here’s a DIY card game to increase knowledge of historical events/facts. It’s modeled after the Timeline Game. You can make it for any history period.
I made the cards above for my Hero Project which involves the World Wars. For our class, we are reading the following book:
So some of the events come from that book, and the rest of the cards involve more general WW1 and WW2 events. As we read one book a month in the coming semester, we will add more cards and we will play a game each week to increase retention of the facts.
Here’s how to make them:
1. Get index cards or cut heavy paper, like card stock, to similar size
2. Put event, image, and date on one side
3. On other side put just the event, and the image
You can sketch the images, cut from magazines, or get from the Internet.
After you’ve made your cards, here’s how to play the game!
Shuffle your deck of cards to get them out of order. Deal out four cards to each player with the side that shows the date facing down. Emphatically instruct them NOT to turn the cards over. They are not supposed to see the date side. Just have them spread the cards with the date side down, in front of them, so they can see them all at once, with only the name of the event and the image showing.
Place the rest of the cards in the draw pile, with the face of the card that has all three things face down. Turn the top card over and place in the center.
Person whose next birthday is closest goes first. He/she looks at the playing card and picks a card from his/her hand. Have the person read out loud the event. Then that person decides if it goes before or after the playing card, placing it to the left if “before” and to the right if “after.” Then he/she turns over the card from his/her hand, after making the decision. If the person is right, the person doesn’t have to draw another card from the draw pile. If the person is incorrect, the person places the card in the right spot, then draws another card. Play goes clockwise, with play getting increasingly harder as more cards are played and you have to place cards in between other cards. First person to run out of cards wins!
Last Thursday on my thrifting trip, after going to our weekly family liber school, I found the card game that goes with the above book, for 4 bucks at Savers. So we played the game today for my Wednesday Geography/History Day of our Gameschooling. Even though I wasn’t organized enough to have scouted out the companion picture book from the public library, I found that the book is read aloud on YouTube. Hooray! So we listened to and watched the video and then played the game.
The game was missing the maps and directions. I found the directions online and had my own map of the USA laid out on the table.
The game got loud and raucous with the racing to be the first one to slap the table with the right card to answer the challenge/quiz question. I have a wide range of ages in our gameschool, 9 to 15. The 15 year old won, but he said he didn’t have fun. Go figure! He said it got too loud. That’s interesting, because he is often loud himself. The 9 year old had a hard time keeping up. So everyone but the outliers enjoyed it. I thought it was a fun way for kids to learn states’ locations, capital cities, and nicknames. I love games like this when it’s “All Play” every single round. Nobody has to wait for a turn. The drawback, however, is for the slower processing kids. Sometimes it’s better to strike a balance and have some round be “All Play” and some be just targeted at one person, one by one. Next time we play this I’m going to remember that and alternate between “All Play” and “Single Play,” just so the younger student can have more opportunities to process the challenge without getting beat.
We also played Two Truths and a Lie, which is the easiest DIY Geography/History game you can do. I passed out my cheery Usborne books. They are so perfect for kids! I love that they show connections between history, fashion, geography, science, and technology in such visually appealing ways. I also love the lift-the-flap books. To play the game, I have my students/kids find three facts in a history or geography book that they find interesting. Then they write them down, and change one of them to a lie. Then after we are all done writing, we take turns sharing our three statements. We then discuss why we think the statement is a fact or lie. Sometimes the decision is based on knowledge of history, sometimes it is based on the reading of body language. We then vote on which statement we think is the lie and which ones are truths. We keep score and whoever has the most points at the end of the allotted time wins!
Bugsy, age 10, has finished the one above by listening and is one the one below now. These versions aren’t as good as the Cherry Jones’ ones from HarperAudio in Audible, but they’re free.
My two scholars are reading the above for their Pyramid LEMI math and science class.
I’m reading the one below out loud to them to inspire them in their Georgics LEMI project. I read it years ago to their older siblings. Delightful!
When I’m too tired or can’t read aloud, I turn on this one, also when I’m driving:
It’s great except for the 70 year old plus woman who does Diana’s voice…ugh!
I’m listening to the one above and below in Audible.
As well as finishing up what I started in October, Julie Andrews in Audible:
One night I felt like a squirrel who needed something light and new (a shiny object) so I started this one below, it will probably take me months because I often feel more obligated to finish the ones above.
I’m reading the one below so my younger kids know why we have a Christmas Jar. It’s the best chapter book to share in January. I read it aloud just three years ago but they’ve already forgotten.
![Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years by [Andrews, Julie]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Oih7NExpL._SY346_.jpg)
Tree of Life Mothering 