Games in History Class {5 Days of Teaching Creatively}

Everyone in our family enjoys playing games - but the problem often arises that we don't like the same kinds of games! So it isn't very often that we have the whole family participate in a game night like we had a couple of weeks ago. (More about that in a moment!) We do make use of games in our 'classroom' though. We like to play games that are inspired by our history studies - for instance, we've played American colonial children's games like quoits and marbles; Chinese checkers (which was not invented in China, but was a fun tie-in anyway); and chess during studies of India and of Europe. Also, from the very earliest days of our homeschooling, the boys built Lego models of almost everything we learned about!

playing quoits at Historic St Mary's City

learning to play marbles

When I teach at our co-op classes, I often bring along games. Sometimes they are directly related to the lesson material, like playing Jenga when we learned about structural physics; and other times they are more to fill some extra class time, and are only loosely related, like The Game of Life during our personal finance/economics class this year. We've also been taking along Monopoly to the finance class, and when we talk about how the stock market works, we'll also play Pit! Landon is really looking forward to that!

Now, about that Family Game Night...

A couple weeks ago we had a 1930s Family Game Night, as suggested in our History text (America the Beautiful from Notgrass). We had learned about how the inventor of Monopoly originally had his idea rejected by Parker Brothers in 1933, but after he published it successfully on his own, Parker Brothers did agree to publish it and sold over 1.8 million games in the first year! That was in 1935-1936. 

This is our old beat-up copy of Monopoly.  It isn't from the 1930s, but it is pretty old. And still has the iron! ;-)

We learned that Scrabble and Sorry also became popular during the 1930s.

For our game night, we chose to play Sorry.  

And look - even Dad played along! He doesn't usually care much for board games! Maybe the huge plate of chocolate chip cookies and bowlful of chocolate bars lured him.

How do you use games in your homeschool? Please leave a comment, and if you don't already follow my blog, I would love for you to do that too.  And head back to the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog to find out more about the 5 Days of Teaching Creatively Blog Hop! Today we are all sharing about Toys, Games, and Puzzles.  Follow the links below to see what others have to say.

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