Paul and I have not done much “school” since I posted at the beginning of February about our “school at home” progress. Obviously, this was due to the fact that I was in the uncomfortable last stages of pregnancy and then actually having a baby and taking care of a newborn.

Never the less, we have read through a book about the Earth from a fabulous Early Bird Early Learners series by Lerner Publications (this particular book). It’s written for slightly older kids, but by reading together, one chapter at a time, Paul and I enjoyed learning how the Earth’s crust moves, what volcanoes and earthquakes are, and what all of that means for us.

Since neither of us have been in the mood for worksheets lately, I was trying to think of a way to make remembering and reviewing these details fun. We weren’t interested in sitting in the school room, but Paul always wants to play board games with me!

Voila! We turned Earth’s Crust into a game!

I found a mostly blank game board online. Paul found pictures in the book that he liked and I found similar ones online as well as a few clip art images to illustrate the game board. Then we added squares to correlate with the images: each of these squares gives or takes away an earth “token.” So, landing on a volcanic eruption may cost you two tokens, and the squares before and after it are labeled “volcanic ash” and may cost you one token. A “sleeping volcano” gets you a token.

And then we made questions, Paul reading me sentences he liked from the book and me rewording them as a question or as a true/false sentence. When we land on a blank space on the board, we have to answer a question. Right answers get us more tokens. Whoever has the most tokens when we’re done playing the game wins!

Paul and I have played this every day for two weeks now. He loves it! For the first days, he’d have to read the book to find the answer; sometimes I had to help him by finding the page or picture that correlated to the question. But now he knows the answers without having to look for them. How many four-year-olds care about magma (the name of a new imaginary friend, apparently) and lava and the plates of the Earth’s crust, which are moving? It’s quite fun to see him get excited about these things.

Caroline is usually on my team. She usually sleeps through our turn. Sometimes Paul wants her to play by herself. She sleeps through that, too, and Paul takes her turn. He loves to include her, though.

 All pictures on this post taken March 8, 2012. Caroline, age 2 weeks, 1 day old.