A Rare Post on Homeschooling on a Homeschooling Blog

Last Christmas Santa left a cool package underneath the tree. It is a game called “Sequence States and Capitals.”

It is a fun and simple game. Each payer is given seven cards. Each card has a picture of a state with its capital city marked on it and the name of the capital city printed over it. There are also "ADD' cards and "REMOVE" cards which, ironically, allow a player to add or remove playing pieces from the board. 

The board has pictures of all fifty states with the state names printed over it. The rules are fairly simple. “Beginning with the player to the left of the dealer and moving in a clockwise direction, each player selects a card of their choice from their hand and places it face up on a discard pile (players should start their own discard pile in front of them visible to all other players) and then places one of their marker chips on a space on the game board that has the same state shape and color as the card played. Each card is pictured twice on the game board. A player can play on either one of the card spaces as long as it is not already covered by another marker chip.” The goal is to make two sequences. A sequence is “a connected series of five of the same colored chip either up or down, across or diagonally on the playing surface.”

We love this game! Major Havoc and I play one game each day as part of his school work. Yesterday, I saw him point to a magnetic map of the United States on the refrigerator and excitedly announce, “Hey, dad, look! It’s Helena. Montana!” He’s not only learning all of his states and all of their capital cities, but he’s practicing his reading skills as he reads aloud the state and its capital with each turn.   He's having fun and doesn't appear to realize that he is learning.  That's very cool.

This example of educational excellence comes without a tax increase for education, a pay raise for the teacher, an increase in costs for my health insurance, reading Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, or signing up my students to be members of President Obama's "Organizing for America" program as is being done in Ohio public schools. 

(Great post, Opus #6)