Gameschool 101: What It Is & Why It Works in Our Homeschool

[Music] Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallock Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be all about game schooling. We are going to talk about what game schooling is, how we got started with game schooling, how you can get started with game schooling, um how to build a game school library if you're wanting to add some more games to your homeschool, and some of the benefits that I have seen from game schooling in our homeschool over the years. Okay, first let's talk about what a gamechooling is. Gameschooling is basically learning or teaching with games. It doesn't mean that games are all that you use in your home school. It doesn't mean that you're not using curriculum or that you're not reading books. Um, it doesn't mean you're going to sell everything that you own and you're like, I'm only going to use games. Not that you can't. You could, but it just means that you are simply using card games, dice games, or board games as a resource or tool to teach or learn. That's it. If you're doing that, you're game schooling. Um, it also doesn't mean that you own a ton of games. You can literally own one and still game school. Um, it also doesn't mean that you're only playing or using like the very educationally marketed games because in my opinion, every game is educational, uh, whether it's marketed that way or not. But it doesn't mean that like you have to have specific games to be able to do it. You can game school with any game. Um, in fact, I'm going to talk to you in a little bit about how you can just use some dice or a deck of cards and still game school in your home school. Okay, now let's talk about how we got started game schooling. So Emily was in first grade and it was the holiday season. Um, so we're talking around Thanksgiving. I was a full-time college student at the time. I was super duper stressed because it was finals again. Holiday season, we had all of these like holiday family obligations coming up and I was ready to pull my hair out. Kevin said, "Maybe the best thing for you is to take a break from homeschooling since it's the one thing you can control." Which that was a great idea. So that's what we did. We ended up taking about 6 weeks off from homeschooling, meaning that we didn't do anything that I was deeming at that time educational. Uh, the one thing that we did do was play some games because that's always been part of our family culture. Even growing up, I remember playing games when we got together as a family. When I was younger, um, we played a lot of Phase 10, uh, catchphrase, that like little round disc you would pass around. Like, we played a lot of family games together. And even when Kevin and I started dating, we would play a lot of two-player games together. I mean, very traditional ones because we hadn't entered the world of like, oh, there's so many games you don't know about. Um, but we were already playing like Shoots and Ladders and Candyland with Emily because she was, you know, four, five, and six, and that's what we knew. But over that holiday season, Kevin was like, I think she's old enough to learn how to play Yatsi, which by the way is his favorite game. So, he was so excited. I said, "Yeah, okay. We can help her. Um, but we're going to definitely have to do her scorecard for her because we were currently like seriously struggling with math facts. Like you guys, I'm not even kidding. 1 plus 1 equals 2 was a struggle. And I had been spending the past 3 months drilling and killing and trying everything. I mean, flashcards, uh, songs and sing alongs, YouTube videos, bouncing on a bouncy ball while we said the the numbers. We couldn't get past the ones and twos to save our lives. So, I was like, "Yeah, that's fine. We can teach her, but we'll just have to do the math for her." No problem. So, we did we did that for six weeks. We played games. When we came back to school, like officially came back to home school in January after the new year, I sat down and I kind of remember being like, "Oh, I really don't want to do this again." Like, I was so defeated that I couldn't seem to help her get past this hurdle of math facts. And I knew I could move on, but I also knew that if we could just remember even some of the basics, it would help her so much. and it would help her confidence and math and her confidence in math was the one thing she had kind of already always been struggling with. So, I really wanted to be able to help her. So, I was like, I don't know what else to do, but here we go. We'll try it again. And we sit down and she like just knows them. She knows the ones. She knows the twos. Heck, she even knew what 6 plus 6 was, which was 12. And I was kind of like, "Wait a minute. What? I didn't teach you this. We didn't even get into this." Kevin came home from work and I was so excited to tell him that. and had conquered her math facts like all the way up to sixes. I don't know how it happened. So that night we're playing yatsi. He's like, "Well, that's awesome either way." And he rolls and she's like, "Oh, daddy, that's either 18 on your sixes or 25 on your three or four, three of a kind." And we both kind of look at her like, "Wait, what? How? Huh?" I mean, Kevin's mental math is like amazingly quick and she had even beat him to it. And that's when we realized that essentially Yatsi had taught her her math facts. Um, and I was sold. I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna figure out a way to play more games as our homeschool. Like, there's obviously benefits here." So, I started researching it. Obviously, I found out game schooling was a thing. I learned about a lot more games than I had ever known existed. Um, and I started making a space for them in our home school. I started accumulating educational games. I mean, we literally went from, I think, only maybe 10 games to like 50 by the end of that year, probably a hundred by the end of the next year. We used all of as much of our homeschool budget as we could towards them. And we just started with like simple things like um okay, on Monday we'll play a math game instead of doing a math lesson. And on Tuesday, we'll do some sort of, you know, phonics or spelling or language arts game instead of doing a lesson. And on Wednesday, we'll play maybe a science game instead of doing a lesson. on Thursday we'll play a geography game and on Friday you can free pick any game you want. And then over time it turned into okay on Fridays we're not going to do any curriculum and we're just going to play games all day. Um and then now we're at the point where we just fuse games in wherever we can as often as we can because obviously I know the benefits of them. But that was kind of our progression into game schooling. I I knew there were tremendous benefits to to gaming, to playing games, especially for our family and our family culture and like our connection. I did not realize the benefits of them academically until I saw them firsthand. And at that point, I was sold. Like I was like, you you're never ever going to talk me out of this. So, that is how we got started with game schooling. some of my tips for how you can get started with game schooling, especially if you're trying to build a game school library. You're like, I have no idea if our family even likes playing games because maybe you didn't have that culture beforehand. You can simply start with some dice. You need five to six dice to play games like Yatsi or Farle. Both of those are just rolling dice and you can get the scorecards offline. You can just print them. You can play to see if you even like them. Um, with a deck of cards, there are so many things that you can do, like so many. Buy a deck of cards and start simple. Go fish, Crazy8s. Look up some card games online. You can go to like Bicycle, like as in the card brand, and play tons of different ones. Try them out. Start a family night where you play a different card game, you know, every Friday night for family after dinner. Um, some of the things that we did for math games just with a deck of cards in the beginning was we would play war in the, you know, very early days. And obviously you're trying to figure out which numbers are bigger than the others, that's a great way to start. After they've figured that out and you maybe want to graduate to addition, you can flip two cards over and you add the two cards and then whoever has the largest sum. Once you're into multiplication, you can do the same thing. You flip two cards, multiply them, whoever has the largest product. So, those are simple ways that you can take one deck of cards and turn them into, you know, all of these different games that you can play and you can make them educational. Another thing that we did to build our games once we knew that we like game schooling. So, this is some great tips for you is to shop thrift stores, especially after the holidays. Like after the holidays when people are clearing out their houses, they will be getting rid of all of the games that they don't want anymore. Um, we have gotten some fantastic games for dirt cheap prices at thrift stores. You can also check in to your library. Some local libraries have like a rental system for games just like they do for books. Um, if you have a local game store, that is a fantastic place to try games before you buy them. Especially once you get into game schooling and the games are now looking at like $40 and $50 games, you really don't want to invest $40 and $50 into a game that your family doesn't like. So, if you have a local game store and especially if they have like the kind of system where it's like a cafe where you can come sit down at the table and try a game, some of them will have like a flat fee like5 or $10 for two or three hours or something. It's always worth it in my opinion to figure out if you like the game before you buy it or to try games that you didn't even know existed. Um, and then the thing that we did to build our library was gifts. Games became gifts for everything. Valentine's Day, somebody's getting a game. Mother's Day, I'm getting a game. Father's Day, Kevin's getting a game. Emily's birthday, we asked everybody for games. I mean, I constantly had a game wish list. Um, and I would give it to anybody and everybody who would ask. I mean, sometimes they would buy them, sometimes they wouldn't, but that is how our game collection multiplied fairly quickly in the beginning because we were using them for gifts so much. And Emily didn't mind because we had such a great time playing them that she was like, "Oh, I love a game. Oh, it's a new game for us to play." Same thing. Kevin and I loved playing games as a family. So getting it for Christmas or for Father's Day or for Mother's Day wasn't like weird for us. We were like, "Oh, this is not just a gift. You're giving us like an ongoing experience." Which was fantastic. So those are a few of my tips for starting game schooling. Just start small with some dice or deck of cards and see if you even like it. And then once you've done that, build your games shelf slowly by checking out thrift stores. Maybe even check with some of your family members like before you even ask for gifts. I know like for example when my mom cleaned out my grandmother's house, one of her favorite games was Romeo, which is now called Remy Cube. Um, and I still have like her original version that has such better quality. It's in like the metal 10 and the tiles are like actual ceramic because she still had it on her shelf. I think I have her original Scrabble. Um, so like maybe just check with your family first like, "Hey, you guys have any games laying around that you're not playing anymore?" because that is a really great way to add to your game collection and maybe even have like another relationship moment because maybe you take your kids to their house and you let grandma or grandpa or aunt or uncle teach them how to play the game before they send it home with you. So now you've created a memorable moment too. Now let's talk about why games works so well. It works so well number one because kids are engaged, right? Like when you sit a worksheet down in front of them, they're not engaged with that worksheet. They have no skin in the game. They don't want to do it. It looks boring. But games are fun and exciting and so they're going to and they're engaged in it because there's a win and lose. Uh they're physically doing things. They're rolling dices. They're flipping cards. They're moving pieces. It's engaging. It's hands-on. It's exciting. And so that is just one of the many ways that make kids want to play a game versus complete a worksheet. The second reason why games work so well is because you can get so much repetition out of them. For example, playing Yatsi, I mean, I'm not sure off the top of my head, but to fill a card, I think you were probably rolling dice about 10 to 15 times. And when we were playing, we were doing like a whole sheet. So, we were doing six games of it. So, let's just say we were rolling 10 times times six games, that's 60 math problems essentially. If I had put a worksheet in front of Emily and asked her to do 60 word problems, even 30 math problems, she would have had a fit and it would have been the end of the world. Um, because that amount of repetition would have felt overwhelming to her. But do it with rolling dice and it doesn't feel overwhelming. So, you can get more repetitions out of it. Like you can I hate to say convince your kids or con your kids, but like it's almost like tricking them, right? So, okay. Okay. you don't want to do these 10 math problems today. Well, how about we play this dice game instead, but we're going to play three rounds of it and you can feel good because now you know they're going to be doing three times the amount of problems they would have done otherwise and they're having fun doing it. So, like you can get more repetitions out of it, which is fantastic. The third way is through connection. So, you can't connect the same with a worksheet as you can again. It's almost like living books, right? We all know in the homeschool world that you can connect more with a living book than you can a textbook. Games have that same effect. A child can connect with a game way easier than they connect with a worksheet. Again, it's hands-on. It's engaging. Not to mention your connection as a family or siblings or friends, whoever it is that they're playing the game with. You're creating a bond. You're making memories. So, that's like a whole extra layer uh to the benefits of game schooling. The fourth reason games work so well, at least in our personal home school, is because of the flexibility of them. I mean, maybe I am not great with states and capitals, maybe that's just not my jam, but I can pull five states and capital games off the shelf and teach that to her without it being something I'm an expert at. Um, or even chemistry. Maybe I'm not an expert at chemistry, but I can read a rule book, right? And I can follow the rules for this game and we can play three or four of these games over the course of three or four months. um and we can learn together. There's like no um there's no entry level or prolevel or expert level when it comes to games. Like you all enter an even footing, which also means that because of that flexibility, there's no judgment. So I can tell sometimes, especially since I'm homeschooling an only child, when Emily and I sit down to do a lesson, it's kind of occasionally headbutting. It's like her and I against each other. I'm teaching, she's learning, she's always trying to give me the right answer. doesn't want to get it wrong. But when we're playing a game, that all fades away, right? Like we're two people playing the game. We're not teacher and student. We're not mother and daughter. We're opponents or we're sometimes working together to beat the game. Like it puts us on even footing. So the flexibility of it to have different styles of games and different subjects that you can teach because there's something out there for every subject and every topic. I promise. in the flexibility of the fact that you know you can do the same game with multiple ages or multiple um interest levels or multiple knowledge levels like even if I know a whole lot about chemistry and she knows very little about chemistry the game I mean unless it's a trivia game doesn't necessarily care sometimes it's still just the luck of the draw or the roll of the dice like there's no pressure and the fifth reason and in my opinion the most important that they work so well in our home school is because they are fantastic for resets Games are a great way to reset reset a homechool day. Whether it is a rough homechool day, whether it's a transition from one thing to another, and we just need to reset for that transition, uh whether it's been, you know, just a crazy day, maybe not necessarily bad, but just a crazy day, and I'm like, we don't have the time to get to all of these things I wanted to get to. Okay, well, we can just play a game and kind of reset my mind, your mind, um or just have fun and still learn at the same time. And I love that. So, I actually keep a basket in the area that we homeschool with games that play in less than 10 minutes and play well with two players. And so we keep that basket for either those transition times like we're moving from basket time to lessons or you know we've got 5 minutes before dinner's ready to be done, you know, ready to to be plated or, you know, we're ahead on our time frame for the day or you know like we're just really not feeling like getting that math workbook out. So you know what we'll do? will just play a game for 5 or 10 minutes. Like, I can always justify in my mind that I know anything she pulls out of that basket is going to play well with just her and I or just her and Kevin and it's going to take less than 10 minutes. And like there's sometimes we're like, "Oh, we don't have time to play a game." Yes, you do. Everything in there takes less than 10 minutes. There's no reason not to pull a game to reset the day or to help this transition go smoother or to just sneak in one more game and change the whole kind of emotion feeling of the day, right? Like I can tell a difference at the end of a day where we haven't connected over games. Like we didn't play anything today. It was a good day, but anytime I say we had a great day, I promise you we played a game that day. Okay, now let's talk really quickly about what game school looks like for us. Now, I mentioned this before and kind of what we did, but I want to say it again so that we can talk about how we've weaved game school into our home school and maybe some ways that you can, too. So, the first thing that we did was we replaced lessons. And I I really really need to say this because I've had so many moms reach out to me and say, "Oh, I don't have time to game school because if I play a math game today, then I'm behind on my math lessons." The trick to that is you're replacing the lesson. For example, we just talked about if your math today, like if you open up your math workbook and it's literally 20 addition problems, you're going to replace that lesson. You're not going to do it. You're going to put a big X on it and instead you're going to play some sort of math game where maybe you're flipping the cards over and you're doing, you know, if you play addition war or multiplication war, that's going to be 20 problems. If you play Yatsi, that's going to be 20 problems. If you play um you know Farle or Quicks, that's going to be 20 problems. So, you're literally replacing the lesson. You're not doing a game and trying to fit in the lesson. Not that there's anything wrong with that because you can absolutely supplement lessons with it. But if your biggest uh like downside, the reason you're not game schooling is because you don't have the time, it may be because you're trying to add it in as something else, like as something extra when it doesn't need to be something extra. It is enough to stand on its own. So, you can easily replace a lesson uh or use that lesson in another way. For example, word on the street, it's a spelling game. You move the little Hang on. It's right here. I'll show you, for example. So, there are like little skateboards on the street, little letters on the street. There we go. And you're basically playing tug-of-war. You move these back and forth. Now, the game itself comes with category cards, right? So, you pull a category and it's like something sticky and your job is to come up with a word that's something sticky and that way you can get the most letters to your side. Maybe you don't want to abandon your spelling words that week, but you still want to play a game. Don't use the category cards that come with it. Use your spelling words, right? So, deal out, you know, half the spelling words to your child, half the spelling words to you, or just randomly draw a spelling word and get, you know, play this game with that. You could do something similar with bananagrams or scrabble. Like there are ways to still feel like you are checking that I did this box for you but putting the games as the lessons for your child. I promise it will also benefit you as well. But that way you can you there's you can get the best of both worlds. So that is one way basically to replace lessons. Another way is to use games as a review or assessment, which this is probably the biggest way that we use them, especially in the Waldockway products, because all of our unit studies include games, printable games of some kind. And I always try to include a trivia game. The reason is because I don't I mean, Emily does test for her math, but that's it. We don't test for anything else, but we play trivia games. at the end of the unit study, we'll play a trivia game and then I know based off of playing the game how much she learned or retained. Uh so that is a fantastic way and you can do that with anything. Uh you can create your own game, right? If you learned about ancient civilizations, you can come up with your own trivia based game or um create your own trivia deck or Jeopardy style game. And that's a fantastic way again for figuring out what they did or didn't learn. Some games that I really really like for that are the Professor Noggin decks because those have um they're just trivia decks on tons of different topics and they have three easy questions and three hard questions. So in the beginning of a unit study throughout we try to do the easy questions and then like when we're done I'll be like, "Okay, let's challenge ourselves and do the hard and then we kind of know how far we've come during that unit study based off of that." But again, you could do that with anything. You could get trivia cards. You can make your own trivia cards. It could be, you know, the games that are included in the Waldockway unit studies. It could be you play Yatsi and they add their own score sheet at the end of maybe a specific computation math lesson. You know, you're you've done with this chapter, you want to see what they're capable of. So now they're going to add their own scoreeet. You can come up with many ways to use it for review instead of testing. Another way that I just talked about that we use game schooling and our homeschool is for brain breaks. We have almost always used them as like an incentive, especially during our in between our morning basket and our sit down lessons. It's almost like a okay, you're moving from the comfy couch. We've been really chill, but we're getting ready to go sit at the table and do some actual written work. So, I'm going to entice you with a game. It's almost always been our brain break transition from one to the other. Um, and then I will easily, like I said, I keep the basket of games that play in less than 10 minutes in the middle of a math lesson. If she's frustrated, hey, why don't we play this really quick? Let's reset your brain. Uh, if her and I are hormonal and at each other's throats, or we're just not seeing eye to eye, like, hey, let's close this book. Let's pause. Let's play a game. Um, if we're just like, you know, tired, we need a reset, it's been a long day, whatever it is, I will pull one of those or I'll say, "Hey, you can pull any game out of that basket." and we will just use them as resets. They're fantastic for brain breaks and for resets and transitions, any of those things. I find games to be the best enticement and kind of like reset button. And then one of my personal favorites is to just have a game school day or a fun day. And it's a day where we don't do any except play games. I mean, we might also read a book or two, but when we do those, we kind of will figure out, okay, we have three free hours or four free hours, and we kind of know how many games we can play in that time period. And so, for example, if all three of us are going to play, I'll say, "Okay, everybody grab a game, or everybody grab two games. If just Emily and Emily and I are going to play, I'll be like, "Okay, you get to grab two or three, and I'll grab two or three." And that has kind of always been a rule in our homeschool and even our family because then everybody has a reason to stay and everybody has a reason to be happy. It's one thing for you to be like, "Oh, I'm going to play through one game I don't love." What you know, if you're playing for one subject or a reset, but to sit down for a game school day or for a family game night when you're going to be there for three or four hours, the last thing I want to do is play four games that I don't like. Um, and I don't want Emily to have to do that or Kevin to have to do that. I want, you know, our game time, especially our prolonged game time to be enjoyable. So, if all three of us are playing, everybody's pulling a game. If just two of us are playing and we have a long time, typically we'll pull at least two and then sometimes we have like a third either in our mind or on the table for like if we have time for it. But anytime we pull multiple games, like if Emily and I are going to have a game school day and we each pull two games, we have in our mind like this is the one I want to play first. This is the one I want to play second. This is the one. Like, we have a hierarchy, if you will. And on family game nights, if we all pull games, we always roll dice to see who plays their game first. So that there's never any fighting. The dice decide. Whoever rolls highest, that's the game we play first. Second highest we play second. Lowest is the one we play last. And then we will pick, we will say out loud, um, if we're having a family game night, whatever our tiebreaker game is going to be. So if each of us win one game, then we'll have a tiebreaker game. and we will like announce it before beforehand like okay if we have a tie tonight our tiebreaker game is Taco Cat go cheese pizza or our tiebreaker game is Uno or whatever it's going to be and it's obviously never one that somebody brought to the table because that would feel unfair that somebody got to play their favorite game twice. And then one that I forgot that we've been doing lately that I absolutely have been enjoying is um playing games over dinner. So we will play headbands. We don't actually wear the headbands. We set them in front of our plates and we will put, you know, the cards in there and play headbands. We will play guess and 10. We own, I don't know, six different versions of headbands. I think we own 12 different topics of guess and 10 at this point. Um, we use our professor noggin or trivia games over dinner. Um, I thought they were right here, but they're not. Oh, the Mount Cleverest um is basically a trivia game, but this one is specifically geography. This one is the original. We like to play those over dinner. So, I try to keep a good assortment of like guessing and trivia games that don't require um like, you know, doing a lot of things. I mean, Professor Noggin, you roll a dice, but that's easy to set your fork down and do. And then we take turns reading. We don't get through like a whole game. like it will take us probably two or 3 weeks to get through a Professor Noggin deck because we only do two or three cards at dinner, but it's a way for us to connect over dinner and still, you know, be playing a game together. Um, I find it really really helpful now that we have a teenager because uh sometimes she loves talking and connecting, sometimes she doesn't. And so for me, it's like one last way to touch base with her, one last way to connect with her before our day is over. So, that's one way that we've been sneaking games in to just like our everyday life. Um, and we've been doing that for about the past year and it's worked really, really well. So, if you're like, "My days are packed. I can't do any of this. It sounds great, but I I just can't." That might work best for you. Also, car rides. We'll do a lot of trivia and car rides as well. Emily will sit in the back seat and she'll kind of quiz us, which means she's learning it, too. Um, but she likes to try to stump us. So, she'll just constantly do like trivia games, you know, trivia questions to Kevin and I while we're in the car. And so, that's worked really well. Uh, trivial pursuit. Normally, we just take the card deck with us. So, that way we're getting, you know, a little bit of all kinds of trivia that she really can stump us on. I would love it if you would leave any of your game school tips down in the comments. Uh, do you game school? How did you get started game schooling? What tips do you have for building your game school library? And how do you work games into your homeschool, especially if you already have a very busy homeschool schedule? Let me know down in the comments. [Music]