Are You Logical?

One of the blessings I had this year in homeschooling has been to work with our co-op's middle schoolers and high schoolers as their coordinator.  Luckily for me that is just a fancy word for helping decide on classes and finding teachers for those classes.  Pretty simple, actually.  I shared with you a few months ago about our etiquette class I taught, but I thought I would share our latest class with you as well- Games and Logic.

The class was my brain child, but honestly I wasn't sure what it would really look like at first.  I had a few middle school boys that needed a class, no prospects for a teacher, and no ideas.  Not sure where this idea even came from, but boy am I glad I let it grow.

I have to tell you I had such fun with this class.  Go figure.  I am not even a big games gal, and logic? No way!

But these boys rocked my world.  And entertained me.

And I am so proud of them!

There are many ways this could be run but here is what we landed on.

Each week we began with a quick warm up activity to get our brains working.  One that we really enjoyed was this simple castle puzzle.  The boys had no picture to go by, they just knew all the pieces went together to form a castle with no gaps in the pieces.  I allowed them to work together as well as individually and we even timed them to see if they could beat their times.  Another game I found at Target was IQ Fit.  It has several different levels of play and we, meaning them, took turns solving the puzzles.  We also played the old game Jenga to see how high we could get it, trying a random play and then one only pulling out middle pieces and one only pulling out outside pieces.

After that we concentrated on a main game or project.  One day we did logic games like the card game Set. Other days we worked on brain teasers and riddles.  One day we challenged each other with board games.

Rush Hour

I think the boys would say that their favorite day was a Lego challenge.  What guy doesn't like Legos, right?  That day each boy had to build a small original creation and then create the directions to build that design.  After taking it apart, another boy had to see if they could build the identical creation following the instructions.  Of course, that led to lots of building afterwards, but they did have fun!

With each activity we did, we took time to talk about how they went about solving or strategizing and comparing each of their styles.  It was fun to talk about learning styles and have them see how someone else might take on the same project differently.

And me?  Well, I just got them started and then sat back and watched.  Sometime I think we parents forget how amazingly cool our kids are.  And how fun it is to see their minds work!  I loved getting to know these boys and just watching them interact.  They formed friendships, learned some new skills, and hopefully learned a little bit about themselves as well.

I would call that a successful class!  How about you?

Linking up with friends!

Blessings,