Home School Games

One of the great things about homeschool learning, is that you get to choose which home school games and resources you want to learn or you want your children to try. The first thing to do when thinking about home school games, is to try to think outside the box, so take a pen and paper and write down all the school games, including paper games, maths games and educational games, that you can think of.

Home School Games

Do not worry about home school games specifically at the moment. Get your kids to join in too.

Think about all the games and sports that you wish you had been taught when you were a child. Make sure that you add plenty of indoor and outdoor games, hobbies and sports to your list. Do not be side-tracked into thinking that games, hobbies and sports are not the same.

For the purposes of choosing home school games they are all in the same category for now. When you have you list, you can start to categorize them. This is up to you, naturally, but I suggest that you categorize them as indoor and outdoor; home and away; intellectual and fun; and active and passive. You may want to add: land and water; computer and traditional too.

You will immediately notice that most games, hobbies and sports fall into at least two categories, which makes it easier for you to provide a rounded selection of activities. So, rewrite your list of home school games with each activity under as many categories as it fits into.

Here is a brief list of games and puzzles, educational board games, interactive card games, some sports and some hobbies to get you started.

Sports: like canoeing, rugby, football, swimming, hockey, netball, baseball, basketball, tennis, martial arts, etc..

Hobbies: like golf, hiking, camping, bird-watching, stamp collecting, painting, hang-gliding, wind surfing, making models, sewing and textile arts, cooking lots of recipes, reading books etc..

Games: like chess, checkers, hangman, Cleudo, Monopoly, darts, etc..

You can obviously teach some of these activities at home and others will require expert help outside the home. This is a good thing, because it gives you some time off and allows your child the opportunity to meet other children.

Depending on your own abilities, you may want your child to enrol in the scouts or guides in order to learn hiking, camping and canoeing; or join the YMCA or gym in order to learn swimming, field or track sports and chess.

You can get involved with some of these outdoor events too and combine some of them as well. For example, bird-watching, hiking and camping all fit together very nicely as do swimming, canoeing, rowing or wind-surfing and all of these can be combined with map-reading or navigation.

Indoor games should be chosen carefully. Try not to rely on online educational games and puzzles to provide your child's home school games. They will learn enough about online games, especially interactive games, on their own accord. Play chess on a chess board and hangman with a pen and paper.

Lastly but not least, do not think that just because your old-fashioned school education did not teach something at school, that it cannot be useful. Calligraphy is very rarely taught these days and look at the state of people's handwriting!

Chess helps sharpen the mind as good as any maths games and helps the players think ahead and try to guess/work out their opponent's strategy. Bridge is an excellent partner game with a similar intent. Cleudo likewise and Monopoly helps teach about money. Darts teaches coordination.

You have a great opportunity to teach concepts and ideas with your home school games curriculum, but you need not teach all the home school games yourself.

Let others teach some of the home school games in order to give yourself a much needed break - you could even get granny to teach the science behind cooking or thematic projects that involve sewing!