Kelsey's game...

Kelsey made up a little game. I have to share it, not just because I’m proud of her, but because this game turned out to be very educational for the whole family! It seemed to give us practice with both Math and Language Arts! The rules are as follows: The first person rolls three dice, calculates the total from their roll, and writes that number down on a piece of paper. The person that rolled then has to create a sentence made up of the exact amount of words that the dice totaled. With three dice, you will get a possible total of 3-18 words, so you will create sentences using 3-18 words. You can think of your sentence really fast. I like to touch each dot as I say each word so that I know about how many I’ve used and how many I have to go. This allows for some instant split second planning. You might need to write down the sentence and count each word to make sure they total the roll. Somewhere between saying the sentence out loud and writing it down you usually forget a word or accidentally add one.

The next person rolls and creates a sentence. I don’t know how you would actually win this game or if you would care, it’s the playing that is fun!

At first I didn’t think there was anything educational about this game but as we played I realized that it was educational on many levels. I found as we tried to create a sentence with, say, fourteen words we would usually accidentally be one word short or one word over. This creates a little challenge and brings in the Language Arts practice. If you are one word short you will have to think up some describing words to add to one of your nouns. If your attempt at creating a sentence left you one word over your total roll you would be forced to look to see if you could make contractions or take out any words that weren’t absolutely necessary.

This gives a little practice with Math: adding up three numbers. Kelsey and I think alike: instead of being able to add three numbers we both rearrange the dots in our minds to get the total.

The more we play, the more ways we will find how educational this game is. For now it’s just fun!

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. -Roger Lewin