Episode 425 – Learning in Board Games: ELA Skills

Listener request today! We’re going to talk about ELA skills and board games to support them.

0:00:00 Fact for 425

The most expensive film produced is Avatar (USA, 2009), with an estimated production budget of $425 million. Avatar went on to achieve a worldwide box-office gross of $2.9 billion – the highest of all time.

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0:03:30 What We’ve Been Playing

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Trick-Taking Game *
Stew
Cat Rescue *
Trio (our review)
boop (app version * – we love boop, not sure this is the best way to play it)

(*) first time mentioned on The Family Gamers Podcast

0:14:45 The Family Gamers Community

Welcome to our newest members!

#Backtalk

We asked you about summer board gaming plans.

Read the answers on Facebook or #backtalk channel of the Discord.

0:20:50 Patreon Shoutout

Shouting out our Patreons! Check out the tiers at thefamilygamers.com/patreon, and you can see our merch at store.thefamilygamers.com

0:22:00 ELA Learning in Board Games

There’s lots of subjects that we can talk about when talking about learning through board games. There’s the hard sciences, there’s math, and then there’s the more liberal arts side of education, which is important, but a lot more difficult to teach or work through with games.

The best way to practice ELA is through just doing more reading and writing. But you can support foundational skills through work with board games, and also inspire more practice for older kids with “gameschooling”.

We split the “older kid” skills into three groups, with games for each:

Reading

You’re looking for chunks of prose text (not a rule book, not just a few words of flavor text) that will force some practice. This is for fluency, simply encountering more text in more ways.

Tales of the Arabian Nights – roll & move blended with adventure choices (read chunks of story)

Look for sequential text – that has a beginning, middle, and end. But doesn’t have to be long! Games like HerStory or Trekking through History have a few sentences on each card.

Above and Below or other similar games from Red Raven will have you read chunks in the rulebook that are short stories. Choose a path after reading some dialogue and description!

0:32:30 Writing

Writing is a hard skill to build on in games. Penmanship can be improved through simple practice. But the harder skill to build is “how to tell a story” (creative writing).

Tall Tales has players physically WRITE DOWN a scene based on a prompt and restrictions. Then all the story ideas are read out loud. One is chosen to be the “real” story and the next round must build off that.

Untold: Adventures Await is an RPG/storytelling game using Story Cubes. It provides a lot of scaffolding to assist. But you could do much of it with just the StoryCubes and a piece of paper.

Bear in Mind uses storytelling as an aid to memory!

Of course, all role-playing games can encourage improvement in creative story telling.

Dixit is a story-telling game. Normally the storyteller is trying to match with just 1-2 players, not everyone. But you can change the rules around this!

0:39:00 Spelling & Vocabulary

Talk about a tough skill to teach or practice! Most word games are pretty punishing for bad spelling. But there are a few that can be used for practice and improvement. (We did a Room to Grow on this topic a few years ago.)

Bananagrams – especially when using B-mods for younger kids!

Illiterati – which is a cooperative game: everyone can assist each other in making words or sharing letters. And the supervillain theme can give an extra little push for a kid on the fence about a word game.

Scattergories – mostly for vocabulary (but also penmanship!)

Tapple / Tapple 10 – can pull in younger kids even if they’re not competitive. “What are other items in this category?”

0:43:00 Have you used games to help kids practice ELA skills?

What other games would you recommend?

0:45:00 New Backtalk Question

When thinking about games that you play with your family, how do you treat them? What happens if a card gets bent, for example?

Tell us on the #backtalk channel on our Discord, or in our Facebook community.

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