I love the fact that Fox Lover begs to "do school!" She's the only one of my kids who has basically unschooled since birth and the only one who never learned to steer clear of me when I approached them with educational opportunities. :-P I am thankful for local friends who encouraged me on this path, early in the game, including Adesa H., and Gleamer S.
Right now, Fox Lover's favorite board game is Telepathy. It's a deductive reasoning game that's a bit like Mastermind and a bit like Battleship. Each player chooses a “secret square” and records the coordinates, color and symbol on a game card. Then players take turns guessing coordinates to locate their opponent‘s secret square. When asked about a particular square, the player responds with either a “yes,” meaning that the square guessed shares at least one characteristic with their secret square (symbol, color, row or column), or a “no,” meaning no characteristics are shared. As players take turns making guesses, and ruling out possibilities ("It isn't red, a circle, in Row B, or Column 7" ), they hone in on the identity of the secret square.
Today we played it 3 times. I noticed that she's becoming more flexible in her strategy and is articulating her strategies. (Deductive Logic, Strategic Thinking)
This provided a natural opportunity to discuss some basic scientific concepts, including the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. In this game, you might observe that you're getting a lot of "yes"es from your opponent on red squares, which might lead you to guess the correct answer is red (inductive reasoning). This is a hypothesis that you can systematically test. The overall gist of the game, discovering the answer through eliminating all other possibilities, is deductive reasoning. We also touched on confirmation bias, the danger of jumping to conclusions about a correct answer too quickly. (Logic; Scientific Process)
We also talked a bit about probability -- if you've narrowed it down to 2 possibilities, what is the probability that you'll get it right on your next guess? (Math: Probability & Statistics)
We expanded our discussion of probability through coin tosses and rolling dice. We made it as far as explaining the pattern (e.g. tossing a coin once yields 2 possibilities, or 2 to the 1st power, tossing it twice yields 4 possibilities, or 2 to the 2nd power, tossing it 3 times yields 8 possibilities, or 2 to the 3rd power, and so forth), but Fox Lover started to get confused and lose interest. Oh well. I didn't see this kind of math until I was a senior in high school.
Other Games We Played:
- Ultimate Mastermind (Deductive Logic, Strategic Thinking)
- 10 Days in Europe (Geography, Strategic Thinking)
- 10 Days in Asia (Geography, Strategic Thinking)
- Pig This is a dice game often used to introduce the concept of probability. (Math: Probability & Statistics)
- Sequela -- Although Fox Lover is successfully delving into more "advanced" math concepts, like factoring and probability, she is still learning multiplication and division. It sounds backwards, but with a strong conceptual foundation, it often works that way. Fox Lover and I agreed that she needs to learn her multiplication facts, which is what Sequela is intended for. It also gives us a chance to build a multiplication table, with colorful cards, and discuss patterns in the table. For example, we've used it, along with math cubes, to review the concept of square and cubic numbers. (Math: Computation; Patterns & Algebra)
On her own, Fox Lover has been spending a lot of time writing stories, and she is becoming a stronger writer. Our dogs are often featured in her wildly imaginative tales. :-) (English: Writing)
She has also been playing an insane amount of Sims. I don't know what it is about this video game that appeals to her so much, right now, but she never gets tired of it. (Computer Technology)
She is also playing soccer, which involves two practices and one game per week. (Physical Education)
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