We love to play games at our house. Games offer a chance to gather together as a family or with friends, to socialize, to challenge ourselves and to engage in friendly competition. There are many ways to incorporate games into our homeschooling days, and we enjoy using both commercial and homemade games to practice our skills and review what we've learned. Any educational material can be made into a game, or a game can be used to liven up memory work, drills, or review. There are many different types of games that can be used in learning.
Many classic games are good practice in and of themselves.
These games can be used at different ages to reinforce and build mental math skills, problem-solving skills, and advanced reasoning capabilities. There are also language games available, such as Scrabble, Boggle, and many variants. These can easily be used to build vocabulary, practice spelling, or reinforce foreign languages. What gets even more interesting, though, is taking content information and turning it into a learning game. Everyone can participate in dreaming up and making games, and just the practice of making a game can be a wonderful drill for children, particularly if the game involves question cards for which they must research the answers.