Gameschooling and Self-Directed Projects

Some of the games we played last week

Our Homeschool Week: January 17-23

What does a typical week in our eclectic relaxed homeschool look like? How do I juggle work and homeschooling? How do I facilitate hands-on child-led learning? Whether you are new to homeschooling or looking to make a change to your days, it can be very interesting to take a peek into another family's homeschool day. Here is a glance into our last week.

Note: I’ve included affiliate links to the books and games we used. If you chose to buy them, I’d love if you can use my link. I get a super small commission on each purchase. It really helps support our small home business.

Monday

Everyone was tired from an exciting weekend trip sledding, so we stayed in most of the day. Both kids have birthdays a week apart so this is becoming our yearly tradition, in lieu of a party. We read books over breakfast. My son picked Madagascar for our current world studies, so we’ve been working our way through some books about that. This morning it was Tamra B Orr’s Madagascar (Enchantment of the World). As we read the book, my son was curious about the water that is between Madagascar and Africa so he brought the globe over and spent some time looking at that, as well as exploring different islands he found on the globe.

My daughter had energy to burn after reading, so we went out to the playroom and both kids were energetically spinning around in the yoga swing and doing…well I don’t know what because I started cleaning up a bit putting things away from our sledding trip.

Dancing Snake Science Project

After that, we went back inside. We haven’t done science in a little while, my kid picks the topics we explore and he hasn't had any ideas pop up lately. So, for inspiration, we pulled out the book Maker Lab: 28 Super Cool Projects and picked an experiment we were interested in doing. Using balloons to create static electricity was a lot of fun. I prompted my son to gather the materials and he cut the dancing snake out on his own. After that he went on to test a lot of other ideas on his own, including repelling non-charged balloons and bending water. Then, we came back together and I helped him log his best discovery of the day into his journal. He referenced the book we used to check his own spelling and he was very excited about his idea for an illustration. He knew it was going to be a difficult drawing to do, but he tried hard anyway. I am really proud of how far his handwriting has come. Writing by hand has been difficult for him, so we had pulled back and focused on copywork and handwriting practice and having me scribe for him otherwise. So, it was great to see him feeling more confident and struggling less with this now.

After lunch, my daughter went down for a nap, and my son and I played two new math games that were birthday presents - Burgerstack and Lowdown Go. Burgerstack was HARD and great for strategy and number sequencing. Lowdown Go was also pretty fun and encourages quick thinking addition and understanding negative numbers.

I had a zoom meeting in the afternoon. My big kid helped out by making a snack for his little sister and they had some screen time during my meeting to play Minecraft. My son also read to himself, from several National Geographic kids magazines.

Every night this week, my husband read to my son from Rick Riordan's The Red Pyramid. They recently finished reading the whole Percy Jackson series together and have enjoyed this next series which spins a new tale around gods and heroes from Egyptian mythology. We are launching into our study on ancient Egypt for history so this provides a fun story to connect with our studies.

Tuesday

Our wild and free children

In the morning, we met friends at the park. The children ran in the forest, climbed trees, and imagined some creative stories involving protecting their “castle” from invading armies. There was a cannon that shot out magical chickens that could turn into Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaurs. Extra points for creativity on that one. My son loved being the leader today because our group of friends was younger than him and mostly liked following his ideas.

Snacks and Math

We returned home for lunch. After eating sandwiches, my daughter and I made rice crispy treats. I was looking for a chance to reinforce math and division concepts with my son. We've been roughly following year 3 of Wild Math. I love how it lays out what concepts I should be introducing and gives me strategies as to how to introduce them. I don't follow anything rigidly, because my brain just isn't wired that way, but I appreciate this resource as a jumping-off point. So I added chocolate chips to our Rice Krispie treats and laid them out in a grid pattern. I asked my son to count out the number of chocolate chips and he figured out that the grid was 5x8, so 40. We figured out how many rectangles we could cut to give each person two chocolate chips and what layouts would work to cut it this way. Then, I asked whether this would be possible if it was a 5x5 grid instead. My son said no because 25 isn’t an even number. The way we do these math questions isn’t “FORCED” it’s part of our conversation, very casual, like a riddle or puzzle. We continued a bit further figuring out how many of the 40 squares we’d have left if we ate 7, how many after we ate 13. We pulled out the abacas so that we could see those numbers in a different way.

During my daughter’s nap, I had a phone call for work. My son decided to play with the camera on his tablet to make creative pictures of random textures and play with filters. He also made a few videos with his stop motion animation app.

Wednesday

Games and a geoboard

My daughter went to a toddler class with Nana and my son played independently while I did some writing work. We recently got gifted this Lego game called Heroica. It's kind of like Dungeons and Dragons meets Minecraft in a boardgame constructed out of Legos. My son spent all morning designing an elaborate game level for me to play. We played the game after lunch.

Nana brought home some library books we had requested, so my son was excited to read to himself two Notebook of Doom books.

In the evening, my husband played Code Stack with my big kid, a spelling game that we borrowed from a game library. My 2-year-old worked on stacking the pieces and recognizing letters while big brother spelled out tricky words for dad and tried to guess Dad's words.

Thursday

My son was again excited to spend a good chunk of the morning designing a game for us to play using our new Lego Heroica set. He enjoyed coming up with some special new rules such as getting new weapons when you defeat a monster. His sister enjoyed building with some other Lego pieces while we played. She loves special pieces such as a tiny sword that fits into the hand of a minifig.

We finished listening to the audiobook of Greenglass House this morning. My son really enjoyed this book and we had fun discussing it over lunch. I'm often more casual with how I approach literature, but we have these story charts so I asked my big kid if he could fill it out with the story we finished. He had a lot of fun dictating the plot to me. What he wrote is more of a book cover teaser than the plot, but I chose not to correct that at this time because the logical flow and quality of sentences were very good. I gave him a small note about reducing repetitive word choice which he responded well to and adjusted. Next, I wrote down a passage from the book without punctuation and added a few misspellings. I had him correct my work. He found most of the mistakes fairly quickly, but one or two went unnoticed so we identified and corrected those as well.

Correcting grammar and spelling

I’ve been curious to try activities from the book Family Math, so we flipped through to find one that looked interesting. We played the Hot Air balloon challenge game. We looked at another game, but my son noticed it was similar to Battleship so we played that instead. My daughter liked putting pegs into my board and so this was easier to play than it has been in the past.

My son had an exciting math discovery. He was excited to tell me that he is starting to understand the commutative property of multiplication and how it applies to a division equation (my words not his). Specifically, he noticed that in the equation 6÷3=2, you can swap the 3 and the 2 and it's still true. My son and his dad spent some time learning Rubix cube strategy in the evening.

Friday

We invited friends over to play games on our patio. We played a game where the kids act out hybrid animals where the head is one animal and the bottom half is another. The kids thought it was hilarious. Then, they played Blokus and Pentago. After they left, my son spent some time reading to himself while my daughter ran around the house full of energy. Then, we had horseback riding in the afternoon.

To sum up, this is a pretty typical week around here. As you will notice, not much in the way of workbooks or worksheets, lots of hands-on play-based learning, and independent self-directed learning too. I hope this gives you some inspiration as to how a relaxed eclectic play-based homeschool can look. For others who are trying to juggle work and homeschooling, you can get a sense of how I manage. It’s not easy, but it DOES work. I’m so grateful for this opportunity to teach and learn with my children every day and the flexibility, emotional support, and freedom that it provides us.