Play to Learn: Guess Who
Guess Who– one of the games we all grew up playing and that we probably have in our game closets, if we have kids. The classic game is a fun way to practice deduction, observation, and strategic questioning skills. Just a quick review of the simple rules of the game Each player randomly selects one character from a separate pile of cards. The goal is to guess the opponent’s chosen character by asking yes-or-no questions about their character’s features. Players take turns asking yes or no questions. Players eliminate characters on their board who don’t match the given features. The…
Play to Learn: Tenzi and More!
Today in the Play to Learn series, we are deep diving into the TENZI family of games! We will begin with the original TENZI game, that began this collection of games. TENZI is an exciting and quick-paced dice game that promotes fast reactions and is very easy to learn. To play TENZI, you roll your 10 dice as quickly as possible. The game comes with instructions for eight additional variations, including SPLITZI, MEGA TENZI, and TENZI TOWER. Playing TENZI helps children develop rapid and confident number recognition while being highly enjoyable and straightforward to play. It’s ideal for early finishers…
Play to Learn: Dice of Fury
The first three games we have looked at in our Play to Learn series have been games that take longer to play. Settlers of Catan, 60-90 minutes Carcassonne, 30-90 minutes Ticket to Ride, 30-60 minutes There are ways that teachers can be creative with how the games are played, saved, collaboratively played across different classes of the day, but sometimes we need quick games. Quick games can still connect to content in the classroom, but are time savers! Here is one of my FAVORITE short games to use in the classroom! Dice of Fury Think Yahtzee, with more…
Play to Learn: Ticket to Ride
The first American Style board game we will look at in the Play to Learn series is Ticket to Ride. This is one of the easier strategy games to play when entering this genre of games. It is in the group of games I first learned how to play and one of the first games I teach and suggest to new groups of gamers! Ticket to Ride is a cross-country train adventure where players gather and play matching train cards to claim railway routes connecting cities across North America. Longer routes earn more points. Additional points are awarded to players who…
Fighting the Summer Slide with Gamified Reading Challenges
This summer, transform reading into an adventure! Ditch rigid booklists and embrace creativity. Students earn points by completing fun challenges like blackout poetry, character art, and creating music playlists. With varied tasks and exciting rewards, summer reading becomes a thrilling journey.
Play to Learn: Carcassonne
In the second blog post in the Play to Learn series, we will look at the game Carcassonne. This game is similar to Settlers of Catan, in that it is a Euro-style game. The game is based on mechanics versus story and theme. Carcassonne is a tile placement game. Players are looking to match tiles and place tiles to gain experience points (XP) . Tiles are picked at random and have illustrations of southern French landscape. Meeples represent people in the game and score points for the players. There are four types of tiles in the game. Farmland,…
EduProtocol: Fast and the Curious
The Fast and the Curious EduProtocol is ideal for teaching new information such as math facts or vocabulary words. Anything that with repetition would improve understanding and more to long term memeory. This protocol spans five class days, using just 15 minutes each day. It is perfect to start at the beginning of the school week.
