Homeschooling: The Floor Game

Gina asked a while back if I’d give more details on how to play the floor game.

The floor game is a board game played all over the house, or even outdoors. You and your kids design the game, the board and your kids are the playing pieces.

Using poster board for durability, make “spaces” to be hopped on by the players. You can make your game all about a certain subject (history for instance), or like I’ve done…questions about everything for review purposes. Make up your rules (decide if you’ll have a penalty for wrong answers or an extra turn for correct ones), make a few bonus spaces (“hop 3 spaces forward”, or have one space be a “mystery question” that mom thinks up on the spur of the moment), and construct a large cardboard/posterboard dice.

Here are some questions I put on our spaces for my girls aged 6 and 8:

• How many planets are there? Name as many as you can.
• Spell the name of the month in which you celebrate your birthday.
• How many digits in 1,002,200,333? Hop to the next space if you can read this number correctly to me.
• Say a Bible verse and reference. (Or put the reference there and have them quote the verse)
• Name 5 internal organs.
• What’s the world’s largest desert?
• Name the 4 oceans
• Do 5 jumping jacks

You get the idea. The fun part is when you take these spaces all over the place…up and back down the stairs, in and out of the bathtub, around hazards like dirty laundry (gasp, yes, it exists!!), up onto step stools, etc.

This game is so flexible. If your children need to work on their multiplication tables, your younger ones can still play by adding the numbers instead of multiplying.

Store all the spaces in a labeled gallon sized ziplock in your game cupboard! Incidentally, this is a good way to store all your puzzles…just cut the flat picture part out of the box top and store in bag with pieces. Saves a lot of space!