This semester marks the beginning of what I can only call my homeschooling journey with my kidlet after the closing of her project based learning school at the end of last year. This move has required my pulling out my experience as an elementary school teacher and combining it with my more recent work on games and learning.
I have to admit that after more than 22 years away from the world of elementary education I was a little tentative about teaching elementary aged children in a more official way than just being a parent, especially using an approach that is very different from the one that I used in the classroom myself.
We have spent time during the day letting our desires guide us. Do we want to read, do science, do math, build things, or play games? And then after those things are done we have some fun figuring out where those things fit in to the things that we want to learn. Who knew making words and screaming “peel!” was actually teaching us something about spelling? Who knew slamming down cards at a frenetic pace and then figuring out who won at the end could possibly have anything to do with math? And most importantly I want to know where the math based RPG games were when I was a kid.
These last few months that I have spent doing curriculum planning and thinking about how and when games would fit into our homeschooling curriculum have been both challenging and enlightening. In many ways I think that this homeschooling journey is going to reinvigorate my game studies work, but it will also (most definitely) cause that work to shift in such a way that it is going to include more thought and discussion of practical application of games and education theory.
Over the next few months (at least) I expect that you will hear more around here about playing games with your kids with an eye towards both fun and learning and I hope that you are as excited as I am.
