I think I've written in the past about our game day tradition. The boys get to select one day each month where all we do is play games. There are no other structured lessons that day. What we learn, we learn from games. Usually, each of us pick two games. It takes us several hours to play all six games. Sometimes, we don't even get to all of the games because we run out of time. Sometimes, we save a game for when Daddy gets home and we all play around the supper table.
Because my boys are young, they don't save their game days. So we usually have a game day early in the month, usually one of the first couple days. This month was no exception. Game day was on the 4th of the month, which was only the second weekday we had this month.
The games we selected were: scrabble sentences, racko, sorry, don't break the ice, splash and yatzee. This month, we had lots of math games and only one game to reinforce language arts. But what a language arts game it was! I want to tell you about Scrabble Sentences.
I picked up this game at a thrift store over a year ago. Recently while shopping at one of my favorite yard sales, I saw another copy of this game. My husband actually picked it up and brought it to my attention because it looked like such a good game. I quickly told him that we already have that game. This is a fun game made up of 21 dice, a dice shaker, timere, and a scorepad...that's it! Each of the dice has six words written on them. When it's your turn, you shake the dice onto the table and try to make sentences out of the words that roll face-up onto the table. The sentences must cross each other like words on a scrabble board would. For every sentence that uses seven words or more, you score 50 points. If your sentences are below 7 words, you multiply the number of words by that number to get your score. For instance, a four-word sentence scores 16 points (4 x 4).
The timer is short, just three minutes. And we have yet to use all of our dice to build inter-locking sentences before the timer was finished. As you are building sentences, the rest of the players look on. Our boys like to read as you go. As you may imagine, we come up with some pretty silly sentences.
This game could easily be made at home. Get some small wooden blocks at the craft store and use a permanent marker to write various words onto the blocks. Be sure to use a good mixture of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, but don't forget the articles! If you need some help making your dice permanent, check out my blog entry about making dice.
I highly recommend scrabble sentences. It reinforces grammar for the boys, and it's just plain fun!