Month: June 2021

Our Favorite Family Games To Play At The Table

| Riss

We play a lot of games together as a family. A LOT. Board games, card games, dice games, video games… games for fun and educational games. We are just a gamer family (shrug). I mean we taught my daughter Uno when she was 3. I’m not even sure she knew all her numbers at that point, but we played Uno together as a family quite a bit because that’s what she could play! Now she’s 7 and my son is going on 19 – our game collection (both tabletop and video) is EXTENSIVE.

So believe me when I say we know games.

Now, you might be thinking of all the “traditional” games like Monopoly or Battleship or even Risk and Scrabble… and yes we have those too. But those are by far NOT our favorite games to play. We like games that are little more… involved? A little less “see-who-gets-to-the-last square-first” and a little more unique.

In no particular order, I present to you – Our Favorite Family Games!

1) Dominion

I know I said these weren’t in any particular order, but Dominion IS probably our favorite game out of all of our games. It is a MASSIVE card based game with over 12 expansions. At one point we owned every expansion that existed but I believe we are short 1 or 2 as of this post writing. This game is different every single time you play, with more expansions providing even more play strategies and variations. You don’t NEED any expansions to enjoy this game but I guarantee you’ll WANT them after you get the hang of how to play.

Our daughter does not yet play this game as it involves quite a bit of reading – each card has a different “function”, and actions you can take within the game, printed ON the cards – and some advanced strategy. This game plays well as a 2 player game but I find it to be the most fun with 3 or more. It can be a lengthy play, some of our playthroughs have taken 2-3 hours or more – depending on how complex we’ve chosen to make it with the various cards in play. A simple, straight forward, no-frills, game setup could probably be played through in 45 minutes or so.

Our favorite expansions:
Hubby’s pick: Prosperity, for the higher value money and point cards introduced
My pick: Seaside, for the duration effect cards introduced

NOTE: I highly recommend getting the BIG BOX set if you are looking to invest in the game, as it comes with the Intrigue expansion which adds a lot of playability from the get-go and you CAN NOT get this expansion as a stand-alone set anymore!

2) Alhambra

Alhambra is a tile based, city-building game and plays well as a 2 player game. It accommodates up to 6 players – adding more players tends to change the strategy of the game a bit and significantly increases the speed of the game play. 2 players could play through this game in roughly an hour, whereas 4 to 6 players could finish in under and hour.

We recently taught our 7 year old this game and I love it for it’s education value regarding money management. Part of the strategy of this game is collecting enough money of a certain color to hopefully purchase the tile piece you need to add on to your city. Critical thinking and spatial orientation skills are exercised in determining just how to structure your city.

Advanced players will enjoy the strategy of purchasing pieces that will help you get more points than your opponent(s) or force your opponents into taking a less desirable piece. This game includes just enough random chance to be satisfactorily re-playable, balanced with strategic play that is easy to repeat.

3) Sushi Go party

Sushi Go Party is a stand-alone expanded version of the card game, Sushi Go! Sushi Go Party includes all the same mechanics of the fast paced Sushi Go! with the added benefits of more variety, and the ability to have up to 8 players (versus 5 players max for the original Sushi Go!). This game plays best with 3 or more players and the difficulty level can be tailored up or down for younger or advanced players.

The game consists of 3 rounds and can be played through in 20-30 minutes. It’s a cute game and is fairly strategy-light when using the basic cards. We picked this game up when K was 5 or 6 and it was really easy for her to learn! We often play this at family get-togethers too. Overall this is an adorable, lighthearted game for all ages!

4) Ticket to Ride – Europe

This is a game based on collecting colored “tickets” to complete legs of various train routes, in order complete “trips” and earn points. You’ve probably even seen this game in big box retail stores as it’s gained in popularity over the last ten years.

There a SEVERAL versions of this game including the original version, which is based on a map of the continental US, as well as versions for Nordic countries, Japan, India, and a “first journey” edition aimed at younger kids. The Europe edition is our favorite as it is slightly more complex than the original version with added game mechanics.

Our 7 year old can play this game and although she hasn’t quite grasped the larger strategy of the game yet, she’s getting there. From a homeschooling perspective, I love these games to introduce/reinforce some World/US geography.

The game accommodates up to 5 players (depending on version) and can be played through in roughly an hour, give or take. As a 2 player game, it provides an easy relaxing night of fun – with more players things can get a bit more competitive as critical routes become more highly sought after. This is one of our “go to” games!

5) Quiddler

This word-building game was first introduced to me by my bestie and her family during a summer trip to Pennsylvania. I ordered it from Amazon before I even got home so that it would be waiting for me, I was that excited to share it with my family. Actually, my husband is the only one in our home, to date, to actually play it with me as our daughter is not yet spelling-advanced enough to do so and our son is living states away.

Scrabble-esque, this game requires you to make words with drawn letter cards, starting with a 3 card hand and working up in rounds to a 10 card hand. In Scrabble style, more common letters are worth fewer points while letters like W, X, or Q are worth 10, 12, or 15 points (respectively).

This is probably my favorite TWO PLAYER game simply for it’s ease of set-up, duration of play, and medium-level of strategy required (hubby and I often play this game before bed). However, it accommodates up to 10 players. Play through can take anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour, depending on how many players, how quickly you draw the letters you need, and how much you fish for those higher point value cards!

We have SO MANY other games that we love, that my list was growing too long to include reviews of them all in one blog post (LOL)! So I’ve simply linked the rest below so you can check them out (though I’ll likely return to review some of these in another post 😉 ).

What are some of your family’s favorite games? Let me know in the comments! We are always on the hunt for new games to add to our collection 🙂

xo,
Rissa

ADDItional games we recommend:

Homeschool Resources for Struggling Readers with A Multi-Sensory Approach

| Riss

My daughter is 7 and has been homeschooled her entire life (we started when she was 3). She struggles to read – has always struggled. Part of that is due to a visual processing delay, part of that is due to very low frustration tolerance, and part is due to lack of focus and other aspects of autism that affect her learning.

Over the last year, we decided to focus ONLY on language arts and math, pushing phonics and reading skills more than anything else to help her get caught up. The beauty of homeschooling is the ability to slow down or speed up learning, based on your child’s needs, and tailoring their lessons to their skill level.

In our homeschool we use an arsenal of resources including games, workbooks, media, manipulatives, etc. which I have SCOURED the internet (ok let’s be real… I scoured Amazon) to find.

If you have a struggling reader at home, check out these resources! We use a combination of these daily and have seen a LOT of improvement in her reading ability!

180 days of spelling & word study

These workbooks are fantastic! We’ve worked through grade 1 and are on track to finish it in time to begin grade 2 this fall. I credit this workbook with the majority of progress we have seen this year. It is very logically orgnanized, and provides a one page daily exercise to strengthen vocabulary, spelling, and reading. This workbook focuses on phonics to create weekly word groups, explores changing verbs to past and present tense, provides sentence context and sentence building practice, and more. I already the grade 2 workbook in my Amazon cart and will be clicking that buy button within the next few weeks.

Handwriting Practice Paper

Every week we use the vocab list for the 180 days book and I have K write the words one or two times each. I got really tired of trying to use spiral bound notebooks or loose leaf paper for this – the notebooks I had on hand were all college ruled and I honestly hated the thought of buying a wide ruled notebook. I wanted lines with the dotted middle line for her and I wanted to be able to use the same notebook for the whole year. This book of 100 pages (it comes in a 200 page option too) fits the bill! We use it for ALL of our writing practice, from handwriting practice to sentence building. It’s easy to recognize too, as opposed to non-descript school notebooks that tend to get lost in the shuffle more often than you’d think.

BOB BOOKS

I LOVE these little books. Each short story focuses on a handful of key letters/sounds, which build on each other as you progress through the set. We’ve worked through 2 sets of these, are currently in the middle of set 3, and I fully anticipate buying future sets as K progresses further. I also really love that the illustrations are simple and use only 1 or 2 colors throughout the whole book. For kids with visual overwhelm (or a visual processing delay) reducing the amount of “noise” on the page is VERY helpful! There are also Bob Book Workbooks that have accompanying activities for extra practice/immersion.

Big Box of Sentence Building

This was a recent addition to our reading toolkit. It’s admittedly a little overwhelming with how MANY words are included in this box. BUT, we took the opportunity to sort the words into various parts-of-speech. So now we have sandwich baggies of “verbs”, “nouns”, “prepositions”, “pronouns”, etc. If you get this, I HIGHLY recommend sorting the words in this way, because it is MUCH easier to find the words you need when practicing sentence building.

We use these tiles to build silly sentences, or to use her words of the week from her 180 days workbook in sentences. Or I will build a sentence and have her read it for practice. There are a myriad of ways to use this resource!

my first bananagrams

This is a version of the classic bananagrams that is geared toward younger kids and early readers. Letter tiles are bigger and differently colored, with vowels standing out in yellow among red, blue, and green consonants. Some double letter tiles are included like “oo”, “th”, “wh”, “at”, “ea”, etc. It does come with instructions for game play, but we tend to use these as manipulatives to practice spelling “by ear” (given a word, find and arrange the correct letter tiles to make the spoken word), or to practice word families.

learning palette

There are also SO many packs that can be used with the palette base, not just reading based packs. There are packs for addition and other math concepts too! I like to select one “sheet” from the packs we have and use this as a warm up activity. It requires a little visual scanning, critical thinking, and fine motor skills. This palette is a great addition to a multi-sensory approach to reading and best of all, it is self-correcting (answers on the back). Once you buy a kit with the base, you can simply search for the stand alone packs, like this one, to add on as needed and there are various grade levels to choose from!

my first reading library

From Usborne Books comes this FIFTY book, phonics-focused, library for emerging readers. Starting with the green level, kids and adults take turns reading, gradually increasing the amount of words and pages the child reads as you progress through the set. Pages meant for adults to read aloud are in smaller text, while pages meant for children to read aloud are in larger text. The stories are short and cute, and the books include reading comprehension questions/activities at the end of each story. We do one of these about every other week, as the reading skill needed increases with each book, at a more rapid pace than the Bob Books, and the illustrations tend to be a bit distracting with lots of color and detail.

In addition to the above resources, we also utilize media like Teach Your Monster To Read and Education.com. I also have a WISHLIST of items from Amazon that I’d like to add to our arsenal. Some of the items on this list are:

Teaching your child to read, especially when they have special needs associated with autism or ADHD or visual processing delay, can be frustrating and difficult at the best of times. I know there are have been so many days I have literally cried feeling as if I am failing at this homeschooling thing. But, over time I HAVE seen definite improvements, and each week seems a little less difficult than the last. I credit the tools and resources we are using. Some kids just need a different approach. For us, a multi-sensory approach works best and we love mixing and matching games, media, and workbooks for our language arts and early literacy lessons.

Please leave a comment and let me know if you have tried any of the resources listed and how they’ve worked for your family!

xo,
Rissa