Educational Games

We have a special treat for you today. Track A mom, Jaime Hendrickson, shares with us some of her favorite educational games. As we head into the gift-giving season, games are an excellent gift for students and adults alike. Also, the upcoming holiday break is an excellent time to slow down and enjoy a family game. It’s a triple win — connection, learning, and fun! Check out the games that Jaime recommends and don’t forget to swing by The Den (the SLOCA bookstore) for more educational games and gifts. Follow The Den on Instagram (@THE.DEN.AT.SLOCA) and check out the 2020 Holiday Gift Guide for gift ideas for everyone on your list.

Let’s play…

Playing with and reading to our children are two tenets of nourishing a rich, educational experience for our kids and family. I appreciate that at SLOCA the teachers and the grid reinforce this every week. Reading with my children has come naturally to me, but the box on the grid and the strong reminders in the emails to play math games could stir up my fears…Where do we find time for this? Are the kids just going to resist? Where am I going to find time to learn this game before I teach it? Thankfully practice, creativity, and adapting games to our homeschool days, and playing math games out of homeschool hours my fears have faded away.

While I will admit that the idea of playing traditional board games with ladders and licorice swamps brings me to the edge of a coma-like nap, I am able to have grace for myself after hearing Brene Brown share about her discovery of play. In The Gift of Imperfect Parenting, Brown shares her sense of dread when she asks her son to play a game and he pulls out Candyland and it feels like parenting not play. Brown goes on to cite the work of Stuart Brown where he describes the properties of play as “time spent without purpose, play is something we engage in we don’t want to end, when we are in play we lose a sense of our self, we don’t feel so inhibited.”   

While play is by no means limited to games, the following are games that our family has gotten lost in, and some with the purpose to reinforce math concepts. Several were gifted to us and have become family favorites. These games also have a couple of features I really appreciate; they are quick to learn, travel well, and take up little space. Most of the games state Ages 8+, but all the games could be played with Level 1 math.

Sushi Go 

Math elements: addition and multiplication

2-5 players

This is a favorite in our family, and not just because we all love sushi. You can speed up or slow down the pace according to the age of players as you pass and take different sushi cards trying to get the highest score. We also like this game because my husband and I can play against each other while still playing with the kids. 

Clumsy Thief

Math elements: making sets of one hundred with numbers ending in 0 and 5, eg. 15 and 85

Thanks to Mrs. Wallace’s recommendation, this game was just welcomed into our home. We have started taking it to music practice, and I play with each child during their sibling’s lesson. There is a junior version that looks fun too. It takes my Level 3 student 15-20 minutes to play through the stack to end the game.

Sleeping Queens

Math elements: creating equations, addition

2-5 players 

Here’s another game described as 8+ but we started playing in first grade. This is a great math element where you can play all the cards that make a math equation like 3+4=7 and then you draw that many cards. We modified the equations to include subtraction and multiplication. The winner is the first to collect enough queens who are assigned different multiples of 5 that add up to 40 or more depending on the number of players. Fun fact, this game was invented by an 8-year-old girl and her family. 

Kanoodle 

1 or more players

Math element: logic

I saw a 4-year-old playing this at a friend’s house and was super curious watching him play. My curiosity was satiated when we took Kanoodle on a camping trip and the kids brought it out from the car and played throughout the trip. It is the kind of game where passersby start watching over your shoulder and cannot stop themselves from getting involved. I love that this pocket-sized game literally fits into my coat pocket. 

Rush Hour

1 or more players

Math element: logic, life skills for the Trader Joe’s parking lot.

This was a recent gift for our 9-year old, but I spied my husband sneaking off with it for some dad time. The player must string together a series of moves to get the red car out of traffic jams and off the board.  

Mastermind

2 players

Math element: logic

Mastermind is a code-breaking game that was developed in the 1970s and a quick go-to game in our home. What I love most about it is how the kids love to be the code creator, the one in control, they get to see a parent try to figure out something through a series of attempts and fails until we get it right, then they smile and say “you did it!” 

Thank you so much, Jaime, for those game suggestions and for inspiring us to play more with our kids.

Here’s a list of some of the fun and educational games you will find in The Den. Don’t forget you can shop online and pick up in-store.

• Battleship
• Listography
• Lemonade Shake-up
• Drop It
• Maki-Stack
• Sorry
• Scrabble
• Monopoly
• Mindo
• Rally-Up
• Smore’s Wars
• Who’s Hiding in the Jungle?
• Tenzi
• The Rose King
• Match a Mummy
• Jurassic Park Danger! Game

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