homeschool – Raising Wood

In ancient times, including my own childhood, board games consisted of endless variations of Sorry, Candyland, Clue, and Monopoly. Nothing need be said the miserable experiences Uno and Skip-Bo bring to the table. Mix some classic peer-to-peer strategy in with Checkers, Chess, and Backgammon to complete the repertoire. Today, let’s look beyond that for more interesting, cooperative, and enjoyable options.

The Raising Wood Project includes 4 kids, ages two to ten. As part of building and sustaining attention spans, there is very little screen time provided to the children. As part of building relationships with each other, we prioritize and invest in interactive and cooperative games.

The cooperative game model has grown in the US market in a huge way over the past two decades. Previously the domain of the European socialist entertainment mongers, it turned out to be a lot of fun. Eurostyle should have always been part of the USA game dynamic. Seriously, not every game must end with one winner and everyone else as a loser.

You know that feeling at the end of the game against someone else, where you can’t win and you must waste your life so they can pursue moving fiddly bits about to document the progress of their victory. You dread it, so you don’t start the game, either to avoid the loss or dragging someone else through the struggle session. Now no one is having fun.

For children today, we can do better. Out of the two dozen or so games in the house, here are some winners. They’re so good you can even play them with your children together. These are battle tested, surefire winners and you can slap them on the kitchen table with confidence the first time, and every time.

Imagine you have your own flying saucer, and your task is to abduct cattle. You get an intelligence card with the placement of the different obstacles in the pasture, the placement of the cattle about the pastures, and go use your magnets to pick them up.

This solo puzzle game is quick and easy to pick up, and difficult to master, a superb piece of design and game development. Works for all ages, and can present a good diversion for after dinner drink time when the parents want to keep hanging out. For kids, it develops problem solving, dexterity, mental resilience against failure, and buckets of laughs. Probably does the same for adults.

The sun is rising and the baby owls must return home. Use color cards to travel the loop. Everyone is responsible for all the brother and sister owls making it home. No owls left behind, if you will.

Really crushes in an age 4-7 crowd. The cooperative element is well done and the game plays quick. Even better, children can continue the game while the parent must divert to responsibilities. Skills include paying attention to groups status, not just your own player. Also develops task oriented conversation and problem solving.

All the deductive thought requirements of Clue without the tedious, mind numbing, time stalling, ridiculous affection of using dice to move about a Manor. Instead, it addresses the classic question of man: Who am I?

Players must solve for 3 categories of clues to reveal their own identity, which is concealed to the player. All other players can see the identity and assist with a yes/no question sequence for matching elements. This plays fast and will surprise you with how often the kids can beat you with their own skills. Those skills include deductive reasoning and rapid processes of elimination

Honorable mention in the who dun it category is Outfoxed. Clever secret decoder system to qualify in/out clues and a time limit as the suspect may escape. Longer set up and tear down makes a barrier to entry compared to a single stack of cards in Deduckto, so it stays on the shelf more.

Cooperate together to escape an island that is flooding. Escape with the artifacts to win. I don’t enjoy this and prefer Pandemic far more, which is a dynamite family game for up to 5 players. Kids love Forbidden Island without me, and the game will usually make it through a second play before everyone moves on. Skills include probabilistic reasoning, cooperative resource management, and moving quickly.

You stand upon the walls of the citadel. The trees are distant and the goblins teem on the edges, just out of bowshot. You know they’re soon going to come from all six sides. You also know your brothers and sisters stand alongside, ready to dispatch the enemies and rebuild walls as they collapse. This game is hard, often very hard and you’ll lose a lot. But you’ll win and lose together, and the cooperative mechanism is tight. Good for children, adults, and a mix together for up to six players. Builds skills of planning, allocation of effort, and dealing with suddenly bad problems.

Dishonorable mentions, because I found them tedious and dull yet my children love them, allow the into your home at your own peril: Settlers of Catan Jr and Taco vs Burrito.

Keep an eye out for these, they make great gifts for Christmas, birthday, or reward for something done well or character development inflection point in a budding child’s life. Have fun out there.

If you let it, and nurture it, Homestead life can establish its own outlook on life

This means feeling the flow of seasons and the rhythm of weather. Discerning the quality difference in pasture beef, pork and poultry compared to any industrial version. The joy of planting, the care of cultivation, unto the pride of harvesting. The zest of integrating systems both mechanical and organic. The excitement with two boys when they find these bizarre new mushrooms, oblong spheres the size and shape of cowpies that explosively decompress when you step on them.

This also means feeling the downside emotions. I’ve touched before on a dark reality of small scale livestock: sometimes they just die. On the small scale these critters have names. Each has taken time and snuggles, consideration and care.

We Moderns are proud of our ability to breezily skip past the mud and the blood. We try our best to scroll past fear, uncertainty and doubt. We have amusement and therefore we feel distance from death. Sure, we’ll dabble with it in our fiction, but we want to control it. Then when the dark times come and we can’t heal a family member and can’t get the doctors to just fix it, it becomes a severe crisis that we never trained for.

Some hobbies fight this trend. They engage our core being to reground truthfully with our surroundings. Those who hunt and process their own game feel it. Gardeners know it also. A great director can bring us to the brink of understanding. A great novelist can pull you deep into expanding that understanding. Jesus lived through a dark world then and lives through it with us now. His greatest miracle may be the patience to let us each grow and develop that emotional depth in our own time. Surely it’s easier for Him to just call the whole broken place to an end and start over without the suffering.

This is Dot: bred, born, snuggled, raised, pastured, trimmed, dewormed, bred herself, now mothered three set of twins under our care.

One of these twins was easily a third smaller then her brother. Frequent interventions by the shepherds to coax her into nursing were required. It worked, and behold, great joy and satisfaction from all of the family involved.

Dot’s mother, Phoebe, gave birth a week or so earlier. A single kid, the first of the season, very lively. The name Skippy was correct and applied within a week. Great joy and satisfaction, the children gave this one many snuggles.

Last week brought a change in the wind. Dot showed a range of signs of infection, and even with treatment required a put down within four days of symptoms.

Simultaneously, that happy kid Skippy no longer skipped, but stood alone in the pasture as the sun set. Momma phoebe stayed in the pasture, knickering to call Skippy to the rest of the herd. Turns out Skippy couldn’t walk anymore and we couldn’t fix it. In the morning, the children demanded to take Skippy to the vet. Jenny and I relented. Skippy passed in the waiting room. No known cause of death. Deep emotional impact and lots of processing together in conversation. This ain’t Paw Patrol, y’all.

So it’s Friday night. There’s a Texas Rangers game on the radio, and Terrik Skubal is wrecking our bats. There’s a family digging a goat grave together for more then 2 hours. The seeds of emotional maturity we are planting together in this process will bear fruit in days to come. Like most cultivation, there are thousands of indirect decisions that feed into the final product. This is part of our process of Raising Wood.

Well, we have two goats who need milk. We have one goat in milk without a kid. Checkmate Phoebe, you have a new job. Three or four times a day, we will hold her so the kids can nurse. Hopefully she’ll adopt them as her own. If she does, it will be through their persistence and not her eagerness. The persistent widow of Luke 18:1-8 comes to mind, and boy are they persistent.

It’s beautiful when an adoption takes place. The contrast of salvaging life from death is a satisfying emotional experience.

Few things last forever, nor do we want sorrow to linger. The weekend was enjoyable while gathering with friends. No one dwelled on the hard things, that season has passed. Come monday night, Valentine gave her own set of twin kids. The children will feed her leaves and snuggle the kids and come up with names for them. The resonant satisfaction of that experience will also yield its own fruit in season.

“baby goats” is a very exciting set of words for her

This is Raising Wood. It’s good for the children and good for the parents. We are very blessed to be able to do this together, and I encourage you to find something more then modern to engage your family with.

Tag: homeschool

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