Our Book & Game Choices for the 2022 Book & Game A Day Homeschool Challenge!

Hey everybody, welcome to The Waldock Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be our book and game choices for the A Book and a Game a Day challenge. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I will link a video right here that's gonna go over all of the details of the book and the game challenge, how you can join us, how you don't need anything more than just a deck of cards, why we do it, and a little bit more about it. Now, before I show you all of these books and games, I really, really just wanna say that I find it a personal challenge, and I love it to find books and games that pair well together over the same concept. So I like looking at my free checklist for each grade level, which I will link those in the description box. If you don't have those yet, they're amazing. And I like looking, for instance, at the fourth grade skills and saying, okay, for example, Roman numerals. It's something that we haven't done a ton with. It's something that I want to expose her to more. And so that's one of the things I'm gonna try to find a book and a game on. That is not what the book and the game challenge is about. I like the personal challenge, and if you're like me and you like that, that's great. If you're not like me and you don't like that, that's okay too. The challenge is just to start your school year back out slow and meaningful. It is to prioritize connection over box checking, and it is just to spend that time together. So you can read absolutely any book. You can play absolutely any game. You can read the same book and play the same game all 31 days if you want. As long as you're spending that time together, then you're still accepting the challenge as far as I'm concerned. So while I'm gonna show you a ton of really awesome books and games, you don't need any of this to play along with this. So just know that going in. And before you go running to get your pad and paper, I have made this super convenient, and there's gonna be a link in the description box for you that's gonna list all of the books and all of the games with clickable links so that you don't have to do anything except enjoy this video. So when I started planning for this year's book and the game, I knew that there were certain categories I wanted to try to hit. So I told you I kind of referenced our free grade checklist, but before that I sat down and I said, okay, what are the things that I still want to do this month? And that was math, language arts, science, geography and history, biographies, because I have a personal obsession with them, and fun for Emily. So those were the six categories that I worked within when I chose our books and games. So that's where I started. I said, okay, there's 31 days, I have six categories, so that's about four to six for each category. So that's kind of where I started. Then I referenced our checklist like I talked about, and anything that I knew that I could use a book in a game and check a skill master type of thing off of that checklist, I was like, that's a double win. And that's how I picked them. Once I picked all of my books and games, I wrote them on little slips of paper and I put them in a jar, super plain, nothing fancy. And then this jar literally lives right here behind me and Emily picks the paper out each day and then that's the book that we read and the game that we play. Okay, let's go ahead and get started with the math books and games. So the first math book that I have is fun with Roman numerals and then surprisingly, there are not a ton of Roman numeral games. So I got a little bit creative here and I bought a set of Roman numeral dice and we are going to play Yahtzee. So we will use the Roman numeral dice to roll for Yahtzee and then we will write our answers using Roman numerals as well. It's a game that we love and then that way it still gets to be kind of what I wanted it to be as far as the concept. We have fractions, decimals and percents and then we will be playing the math rush, fractions, decimals and percents as well. Multiplying Menace, The Revenge of Rumpelstiltskin and then along with that, we will play both super genius multiplication. So we have one and two, so that way it covers all of the multiplication facts. Telling Time and the Telling Time game and the last one for math, we have Once Upon a Dime and one of our all time favorite, Moneybags. All right, next up is Language Arts. So the first book that I have is Antonyms, Synonyms and Homonyms and pairing with that is the game Super Sleuth, which reviews synonyms, antonyms, homophones and multiple meaning words and it's just a really fun game that we enjoy and then I have Once Upon a Time, Writing Your Own Fairytale and with that, I have our Eboo Create a Story Fairytale card. So we will be using those to create our own fairytales and then maybe write them if she's feeling like it and then I have the Word Collector, which is one of our all time favorite books and with that, we will be playing UpWords, which happens to be one of my favorite games and then I could not pick one. I love them both, so I will let Emily either pick or we'll read them both. We have Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, Tall Tales and then with that, we will play Tall Tales, the game of infinite storytelling. Next up, we have Science. So we have the Book of Brilliant Bugs along with Bug Bingo. We have Explore the Human Body along with Organ Attack. We have the Magic and Mystery of Trees along with Match a Leaf. We have Wild World along with the game Ecosystem. And then last, we have Earth's Incredible Oceans along with the game Ocean Bingo. Next up, we have Geography and History. So I have the Camping Trip that Changed America and then with that, I just have Pick a National Park Game so she can pick from any of the national park games we have. So Trekking the Parks, Professor Noggin's National Park Trivia, the Trivial Pursuit, National Parks, we have Trails, we have, oh gosh, we have probably four or five different national park games that she can choose from. I will make sure that those are all on the list for you but basically, she can pick whichever one of those that she wants. We have If You Were a Kid in a Medieval Castle and along with that, we have Carcassonne, the Scrambled States of America and the Scrambled States of America game. Now, we happen to have the book and the game but the book actually, our smaller version of the book actually comes with the game if you buy that so you don't need both of them. Inside Out, Egyptian Mummy and Match a Mummy and then last, we have Swift Walker, a Continental Journey and Explore the World. Next up, we have the biography category and this is seriously my personal favorite. It was hard to narrow this one down, you guys. Like, it was really, really hard. So, I narrowed it down to the whole story of the donut along with the game, Go Nuts for Donuts, Alice Across America, the story of the first woman's cross-country trip and with that, I have Game of the States because you use, like, little vehicles in this game and I thought that was just super cute. We have June Almeida, the virus detective. She is the woman who first discovered the human coronavirus. So, I thought that was super fitting and then with that, I have Virulence, an infectious card game. I have Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt and along with that, I have Patchwork Express and then the last one in the biography category is Pass Go and Collect $200, the real story of how Monopoly was invented. So, with this one, she will get to pick, basically, again, it just says, play a version of Monopoly of your choice. So, we have Original Monopoly, we have Monopoly Builders, we have Space Monopoly, National Parks Monopoly. So, basically, she can just pick anyone that she wants to go along with this when she pulls that slip out of the jar and then the last category is the fun category. So, this is where I tried to pick things that were either new that Emily had got for Christmas that I knew she'd be dying to do, things that I was pretty sure would interest her or things that were just downright funny. So, the first one we have is Katie's Picture Show. She absolutely loves these books and with that, we have My Big Art Show, Magical Creatures and Mythical Beasts and this one is super cool because you use the flashlight and it's like one of those hidden picture books and then with that, we are playing the game Creatures. So, with that game, it's a drawing game. You get the subject and the habitat and detail and you draw your creature. It's a lot of fun. Never Let a Unicorn Scribble and along with that, she will get to play her brand new Unstable Unicorns for Kids and then I knew she would be dying to read this Dragon Masters. Let's see which one is this. Howl of the Wind Dragon. She got that one for Christmas and so along with that, we will play Dragonwood and the last one which will probably, hands down, be her favorite is Poop, A Natural History of the Unmentionable along with the game Poopocalypse, the world's number two game. So, that's it. That is all of the pairings for our book and the game challenge but if you were keeping count, you were probably thinking that was not 31 and it wasn't. That was actually only 29 because for two of the slips of paper in the jar, I wrote Emily's pick. So, she will get to pick any book in any game off of our shelves so she will have total control over whatever we read and play that particular day and that is what makes up our 31 book and game choices for this year's a book and a game a day challenge. Now, I would love it if you would tell me down in the comments, are you joining us for the challenge? And if so, how have you kicked it off? So, if you're watching this, when it airs, it's only three to four days into the month of January. So, what books and games have you been playing so far? I would absolutely love to know.