A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Games

The Six Best Card Games

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Do you remember I talked about our favourite board games?  I love board games, particularly ones that I can play with my lad.  There are times though, when a board game is just too bulky. At those times, you just want to have a something a little smaller to play.   Ergo card games!   🙂 Let’s talk about the six best card games shall we?

The Best Card Games

Why Play Card Games?

Well, to be frank WHY NOT?

They are so much fun.  You can make them educational and fun, or just play for fun.  They teach logic, numbers, math, communication, deviousness (in a fun way!), and so much more.  It’s a great way to reinforce family bonds!

Numbers Card Games

One of our always fall back to games is Uno.  We play this game using our own “house rules”.  In fact, we play house rules so often that I have totally forgotten the official rules.  🙂   It’s a game that our international students can easily play with us as well.  Almost all of them know how to play before they get here and it’s a go to game when you get a bunch of them together. 

best card games, hand of uno

Skip bo is a game that I grew up playing.  I have many fond memories of playing with the family.  It was a game we played so much that even as my dad aged, and mental acuity started to fail, he could still play.  Again, as with all card games, there are the official rules and then there are the “house rules”.   Isn’t tweeking a game part of the fun of owning it?

Best card games, picture of skipbo

Then of course there all the games you can play with an ordinary deck of cards.   Hand solitaire, sets and runs, war, chase, rummy, crazy eights,  and so forth.   Kidspot has twelve games to teach your children. 

Strategy Card Games

My son loves strategy games so currently his favourite game to play with family is Saboteur.  Pick a card, are you a hard-working miner or a devious saboteur?  Who will get to the gold first?

best card games, saboteur

In Set, the strategy isn’t as obvious, but it’s there.  I enjoy playing this game as solitaire as well.  Just testing out how quickly I can make the different types of sets.  All the same or all different, it’s a challenge indeed.  We got turned on to this game at a homeschooling conference. 

best card game, set

My son’s friend got him into this game and it’s fun. Takes some strategy and some numbers and it’s quick playing fun.   Wizard is an excellent game. This is most often the game we bring with us camping.  Good to play with 2 or more. 

best card games, wizard

The Best Board Games

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The other day I was on one of my homeschooling groups on Facebook. A person asked “what board games are any good?” A number of people listed off their games but many of them started their comment with “the best board game is….. ”   In my house I have a cupboard set aside just for board games, I thought I’d share some of our favourites with you.  Here are our best board games. 

the best board games

Strategy Games

Strategy Games are my son’s favourite games to play.   Games like Risk and Settlers of Catan, and more draw him in like a moth to a flame.   Games like Wonky and Chess make this lad grin.  

Strategy Board Games

That joy in seeing if you can devise a way to beat the people you are playing against, OR if you can find a way to foil them.  For instance, in playing a game of aggravation the lad decided he didn’t care if he won IF he could stop other people from winning before he got his pieces around.   He was so aggravating….  🙂 but on a positive note he didn’t win!  Made for a lot of fun.

Chess: he plays this regularly with his gramma.  They seem to take turns with who wins.   The set we have is a travelling chess set, it is so convenient to take it with us.

Wonky: We introduce this game to every international student who comes in.  It is so fun and very easy to learn.  Just need steadiness of hand. 

Risk: takes a bit of time to play, but the conversation to be had while playing… I absolutely love it.  I HATED this game as a teen playing against my brothers, but playing with my son… It’s a hoot!

Settlers of Catan: just a fun game.  I usually lose!  My son, well, he strategizes much better than I do.  🙂

Educational Games

We have tried a number of educational games and many have fallen to the wayside.  These two have stood the test of time. 

I think my son loves nab-it because it is partially a strategy game.  Can you spell the right word to steal it from your fellows?  We play this very simply with our international students.  It helps them realize what they do know!  We do play co-operatively near the end of the game, as it gets harder to find words with difficult letters. 

Spill and Shake is just a simple spell words games.  Nothing too complicated, just play a quick game and see what you can do.  This game came out of my family home where I used to play with my siblings.

I DO need to mention the board game Sudoku that we had. YES, had.  My son had a lot of fun with it. Large board, able to play a simple game or a more challenging.   I couldn’t find the one we had, and passed along to an autistic lad who was captivated by it, so I’ve linked to a random one.

educational board games

Family Fun Board Games

I know that some of these games are often used by others as educational games.  We just play them to have fun.  Our concern isn’t over building numeracy, geography, or other such skills.  We play only to have fun with each other. 

I grew up playing the classic monopoly game.  I had so much fun with my siblings, and sometimes I would simply play against myself!  But we play catopoly in our household because I have a cat-loving lad so a kind person gave us their used catopoly game to bring a smile.  🙂

If you are of Dutch descent and don’t play Rummy0 there is SOMETHING wrong with you.  🙂  At least in this corner of the world.  A number game that teaches sets and runs.  I grew up with it being called Rummikub.  My lad has it as RummyO.  Just a fun game, well worth playing with up to four people. Hint…. Don’t play with my younger sister, she takes FOREVER to make a single move.  🙂

Mastermind: the hours my lad and I have spent playing mastermind.  Such a simple game of logic.  Hide four pegs of any colour without your compatriot seeing.  Let them guess.  Give clues as to their accuracy.  Then switch.

We have played three different versions of mousetrap.  My lad is just outgrowing this one, but the ubuild it version has been by FAR the best.  No missing pieces, easy to put together, no parts that stop aligning well, and such like.  Just a solidly made game.  I unfortunately couldn’t find it on amazon, so I linked up the original version.  If you find the ubuild version… get that one!

We have two variations of the Guess Who game.  We have Guess Who and Who’s there.  Both are played a bit differently and we play depending on our mood. 

Then we have Topple.  We honestly play by our own rules.  The real rules are easy enough, but the lad’s rules are more fun!  🙂  It just means we don’t play with outsiders as they just don’t get it!

family Fun board games

I hope you are inspired by the variety in our board games.   Have fun with your children, grab up a board game and play.  You’ll be delighted by the ensuing conversations and the bonds you build.  If you need MORE reasons to add board games to your life check out was a guest wrote.

Review: Home School in the Woods

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Home School in the Woods now offers many of their hands-on history projects Á La Carte.  We received War to end all Wars file Folder Game.  The game question that runs through our house now is “Mom, you want to play the game we made?”  “Dad?   Are you busy? Want to play a game?  Do you want to be the Germans or the French?”

Home School in the woods - war to end all wars

Who is Home School in the Woods?

The Paks are a homeschooling family who saw a need and decided to fill it.  🙂   You can read more about their journey here. Starting with timelines and then broadening out to whole units of study and games as well. They are an interesting company and puts out excellent materials. 

How did we use it?

The War to End all Wars came as a PDF.  I found that printing off was easy to do.  Though admittedly… I messed up but my lad took charge and got it all sorted out easily enough.  Handy to have a smart 12 year old around (even if he does shake his head at his mother).  🙂

We liked having the option between colour and black/white, a suggestion from my son was to have some of the images with colour, or at least a variation that can still be seen in black and white.  He had a specific idea but I can’t recall exactly what that was. Our printer is black and white so it was great to have that option, and colouring in the flags was a nice time to chat with my lad. THOUGH we found out after I coloured half of them in that I had done them wrong (see the above).  The lad told me not to bother colouring them in again as he liked them in black and white. 🙂 (and didn’t want me to think I had wasted my time … he’s a kind lad)

The lad took two days to put the game together.  Cutting out the pieces, tapping them together, and gluing down the pages to the file folder.  The game was enjoyed by all members of our household, the lad likes playing.  He wins against me, but his dad is prone to win against him.  So it all evens out quite nicely. 

I printed it out on regular paper as opposed to cardstock for two reasons.  Our printer can be finicky with cardstock AND before we played the game I wasn’t sure if it would be enjoyed by my lad.  This thinking led to me going with the cheaper paper.  KNOWING full well that if we enjoyed the game a lot and wanted to play it more often, it would be easy enough to print off the parts we needed to have in cardstock. By then I would be willing to play around with our finicky printer. 🙂   

My son enjoys this game so much that he made weights to go on the bottom of the game pieces and has plans that as soon as the playing pieces look too banged up he’ll print them up on cardstock and we’ll play even more. 🙂

Our thoughts:

In case it hasn’t been readily apparent in this review, let me state it very clearly.  My son LOVES this game and is so glad we have it.  He really like strategy games and pitting his wits against another person.  He thinks through what he wants to do and this game allows him to do that. I foresee us playing this game often, particularly next year when he wants to study the world wars.  But for now.. Fridays will be a good time to keep playing eh? 

The only thing I would change if I could figure out how to do it, would be to make it a three or four player game, then all of us could play at once. But I don’t know how to make that happen, and just thinking about it makes it feel way to complicated so having it as a two-player game is probably the best option.

One of the things my lad did was to make small clay discs to weight each of the playing pieces down.   He says the game is very fun and he loves the strategy involved.  

We had a hard time choosing which of the a la carte items we wanted.  This one on the 95 theses intrigued as did the timeline of World War II.  I may end up picking that course up for my son’s studies next year on the wars.  I have also been looking at their other war related items. 

Home School in the woods - war to end all wars 
Home School in the Woods.
A la carte items.
War to End all Wars File Folder Game.
File folder game,
World war 1 game.
Digital product.

100 members of the Homeschool Review Crew were looking at the various ala carte items. Click here or below.

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Canada: Discover Canada

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Today I have something a wee bit different for learning about Canada.   It’s a game!  A brain game none-the-less!  I picked this game up a while ago to use with my lad, just a fun grab a card, look at it and see what you remember and can learn about Canada.  

Let me introduce you to Discover Canada by Brainbox.   You can learn more about Brainbox and even play some games while visiting them right HERE.

You might be wondering, what is this game?  What makes it interesting?   It’s a game meant for one or two people (making it great for mom and son).   Take a timer that runs for 10 seconds and a card.  Try to memorize as many details as you can in that 10 seconds and then answer the questions on the reverse side of the card.   The most answers right wins!  In the meantime you are learning facts about Canada.

They have a variety of categories from animals, sports, provinces, fur trade, inventors, first nations and more. Pictures, maps, questions.. fun with learning, can’t really beat that can you know?

If ten seconds is too short for you or your family, extend it!  It’s a game, have fun with it.  

Discover Canada
Brainbox
Game, brain game

Where can you find it?

Amazon.ca: Discover Canada
Amazon.com: Discover Canada by Brainbox

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©2006-2017 A Net In Time. All rights reserved. All text, photographs, artwork, and other content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written consent of the author. A Net In Time . We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites

Review: Planet 316

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 Love the Lord?   Like to do puzzles?   Planet 316 has a Daily Bible Jigsaw puzzle that will challenge you and remind you of the truths of the Lord.   

I admittedly have tried out a few different puzzle apps on my tablet, and this one… what can I say, it’s quick and fun.  There are many aspects to daily bible jigsaw that I like.

What do you get?
A free app for making jigsaw puzzles that when completed have a bible verse show up with an option to share it with your facebook feed.  11 bonus puzzles which are harder than most puzzles, all but one of these bonus puzzles is free. Each puzzle comes with options to make it easier to complete like rotate, edges, sweep, magnet and guide.  

You get one free jigsaw puzzle daily with options, if you have the puzzle coins, to do more.

There are a number of achievement levels which enable you to win more puzzle coins. Some of these achievements are: playing five Monday games, completing puzzles by a certain time, playing 100 games and so on. 

I played the game on my android tablet.

The helps
Rotate -turns all the pieces into the correct orientation.
Guide: for two coins it will give you a peek at the completed puzzle
Sweep – puts all the pieces in the margins leaving the playing field open
Magnet: automatically joins two pieces together.
Edges – removes all piece from the playing field until you put all the edge pieces together.

What I liked:

  • Having a daily puzzle to do.   Every day a new puzzle and a small YAY when you finish it.   It’s enough to keep me coming back for more.
  • Scriptural encouragement.   Each picture, upon completion pops up with a bible verse to inspire for the day.
  • Options to share favourite puzzles easily to facebook.   I’ve had comments of “nice picture” given to me, sparking additional conversation.  Good that eh?
  • Challenges against friends.  Seriously… its fun to know that you can beat people that you know and shocking when occasionally they beat you!  🙂
  • Options to make the puzzle making easier: rotate, sweep, edges etc.
  • Puzzles can be completed usually in less than five minutes making them ideal to hand to a boy child and say “think you can make the ______”?  He loves the “make it easier” options AND if he can beat my time all the better!  🙂
  • The pictures are pretty, with excellent colour. Some I could guess what the image was almost right away and others I wasn’t sure what they were until half way completed.    
  • Excellent customer service.  If you have any questions or issues, they answer immediately and work with you to resolve the problem. 

What I would love to see:

  • More of the harder puzzles. They do have 11 bonus puzzles which I think are awesome!   Trying to do the one that was mostly white was a joy to work on!  And the one with many colours…ah.. I LOVE IT!  It’s good to have a challenge. Whilst the daily puzzles have a challenge of can you make a mystery puzzle and do it more quickly than friends.. I KNOW I can complete them generally under 2 1/2 minutes.  It’s nice to have a puzzle that makes you think a bit harder, I want more of them. 🙂  
  • As fun as the challenges against friends are… it’s hard to know if you are beating them OR if you are beating them using the helps.  I like beating the puzzle on my own, not using helps, and sometimes the allure of competition has me using the helps and… I rather not do that, I want to win on my own merits.  I wish the competition had some way to differentiate between those using helps and those not using helps.  … increase the challenge level a bit eh?  🙂

End result of my review:

I LIKE IT.  Seriously.  It’s a fun free app that inspires me to think beyond the YAY I finished a puzzle, and turns my heart toward God.  A good thing that. So go on, get it.  Be inspired, be challenged and HAVE FUN!

Vendor: Planet 316
Product: Daily Bible Jigsaw
Received: Game plus 500 Puzzle Coins bundle so I could try out all the features. A $39.99 value.
Price: Free, with a price for additional puzzle coins.

Here are the current options for playing Daily Jigsaw:

  To see what all 90 reviewers thought, click here or on the image below.

 Social Media Links:
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/planet_316  @planet_316
Hashtags: #hsreviews #dailybiblejigsaw

This post may contain affiliate links – using affiliate links from A Net in Time helps fuel this blog and our homeschool – thank you!

©2006-2017 A Net In Time. All rights reserved. All text, photographs, artwork, and other content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written consent of the author. A Net In Time/

Today’s Homeschooling

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 The lad and I have been working through various safety issues.

We’ve done fire safety, chemical safety, kitchen safety, and something else.  Today we’re doing animal safety.  We talked about safety around dogs, cats, wild animals.   The lad asked about “poisonous spiders and Poisonous snakes”.   So we talked about the rattlesnake which is the only poisonous snake in Ontario and how to be safe around them.  We did a variety of puzzles, learned the words yes/no, and counted.

I’m also starting to go through our bible materials box and today we have “the golden rule”.
I printed out this copywork sheet.    And went through a variety of pictures and we talked about what you should do in a given situation.  Sharing, caring, helping, and such like.   We’ll pick a package at least once a week and work on it.  🙂

We did a language lesson from First language lessons.   We learned about fables, and took the opportunity to do some art at the same time. 🙂   Drawing pictures of lions and mice and answering questions about how the story went.   It was interesting how this story tied in with learning about the golden rule.

we took the time to look up in 123 Draw how to draw a lion.  It was decided that mommy would learn to draw a lion and the lad would draw out the story (see above) complete with a few embellishments. 🙂  The hunters of course had to figure out HOW to net the lion and it was fairly complicated but they managed it.

 

Time for fun with smarties. 🙂  these are a favourite chocolate confection.

 

This was followed by playing chess with smarties.

 

We did a number of things with smarties first though.  We learned about consumer packaging.  How they can’t put less in the box than they say.. we learned that our smartie box calls for 50 g but we had 55 g.  So we practiced doing less than and greater than signs, we counted out how many of each colour there was and did less than/greater than signs.  Then played checkers.  it was a good thing that we have enough of two colours to play it well.  The lad beat me.

count by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. that was the theme of the day in our numbers and counting book.


I did something different for our animal of the day.  I pulled out my temperate zone books and gave the lad a choice.  He chose deserts.  And of the animal pages in the book he was intrigued by the fringe-toed sand lizard.  We looked it up and found them to be quite an interesting little animal.  They can swim in sand like a fish does in water!  Complete with nostrils that seal and jaws that can clamp shut to keep the sand out.   Quite fascinating the creatures that God creates.

Well.. I was going to show you a foot, but apparently it’s a copyright violation to show it to you.  So I’d suggest you go check out this site and check it out for yourself.  🙂  They have these are special scales that help the lizard move in the sand.

We had a hoot playing checkers using goldfish crackers.
We play modified checkers in that we have no forced jump and we only jump once, even if we can jump two or three times.  This makes it easier for the lad to grasp for some reason.  Over time we’ll start playing by the rules, but for now this is easier, and yet harder.  🙂  I was the smiling goldfish, he was the no smile ones.

When we finished with our bookwork the lad asked if I could hook him up with some thinking computer games, and I said most certainly. Not sure yet where I’ll put him but I’ll find something for him to play online. Cheers! 🙂

We had fun getting trounced at Playing History.   We played  a battle in England between the Vikings and the English and well.. as is true to life, we got trounced. 🙂   and then he did some logic games over at CoolMath4Kids.

Today a good day

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Today was a good day.

Didn’t exactly go homeschooling wise as I thought it might.

On Wednesday mornings I have bible study so hubby dear usually gets the lad busy with book work. but this morning hubby’s brain was fried so that didn’t go over.

Over lunch therefore, we did our normal reading.

10 minute stories

He liked today’s story. I shortened it here and there as it was quite wordy and that NEVER goes over well with the lad. But it was a good story about a firebird, a grey wolf and a boy who had to learn how to listen well.

World History

We are into Roman history now. We are learning about gladiators.

I had gotten the lad onto reflexmath before I headed out to bible study. The lad enjoys this program.

So after I got back from my stuff I got the lad busy with Studyladder. We did math, music, and something else that right now I can’t remember.

This afternoon we played a game with dad. Catopoly
We had a lot of fun playing it. So much nicer playing games with a lad who is willing to follow the rules of the game.

oh..I’m trying to work home-making skills into our week… today it was cleaning the upstairs bathroom. I set the boy at the task of cleaning the bathtub. He did a decent job for a six year old doing a job for the first time. he did an EXCELLENT job of having a bath so he could clean his toys up really really well. 🙂

Then peter rabbit videos were the thing to watch, followed by supper and children’s club at the baptist church. They are learning the fruits of the spirit there. What I know most is how much the lad enjoys attending. 🙂