Enhance Spatial Learning with This Board Game (Great for Kinesthetic Learners!) {Review Blokus}

When we started, we didn’t call it gameschooling -- we just called it “fun.”

I think we gravitated to games because I didn’t have traditional learners in my homeschool.

They didn’t want to sit and do worksheets. They didn’t want to fill out lapbooks. 

And several couldn’t read until much later -- so I needed something that didn’t require them to read independently.

They also wanted to jump and run and move. I had kinesthetic, dyslexic, ADHD kids ...

So we played games. Lots and lots of games.

And Blokus has always been one of our favorites.

I think it’s one of the first games we ever bought soon after we decided to homeschool.

I remember standing in the store, trying to decide if it was worth the cost. (This was before Amazon made it easy to sit on my couch and deliberate the same question!

I almost didn’t buy it … but I’m SOOOO glad that I did.

Because my kids have played Blokus for years. 

I love how it is great for spatial learning, for problem solving. I love how it works for visual learners and you can play with all ages.

I love how it keeps working for my family year after year after year.

Seriously -- it will be a great add for your homeschool.

Click HERE to check out Blokus for your homeschool.

Transcript

Hello, this is ToriAnn Perkey and from my homeschool to your homeschool, today I want to talk about a game that we've had in my family for years. There are so many different ways to play with this game. And no matter how you play, it's going to enhance and increase spatial learning in your kids. So it's a fabulous game for your homeschool.

The game is called the Blokus, and you may or may not have heard of this game. It's been around for a long time. There's variations. I absolutely love this game. This game is really good because if you remember playing Tetris as a kid, it takes Tetris-type shapes and the kids are physically manipulating them. So it's everything that the video game did with Tetris with it's the ability to see shapes fitting in different places, but they're doing it with their hands, which means there's that whole kinesthetic element.

So what is a part of this game? Well, you start with a blank gray board. And I don't know if you can see this, but you see how it's got a texture to it. So there's a grid board, and it's up to four players in the classic version of the game. And the pieces come in different shapes, and they're all these different - I don't know if you can see that - but you see how they have ridges?

And so this is five squares. It's one-by-one squares attached in different ways. So you have different shapes and depending on the shape determines how it fits on the board. The traditional way that you play is up to four people start in a corner ... one person starts in each corner. So there's four corners, and you start placing pieces, and the rule is that you have to touch the pieces corner to corner, like so, and they're not allowed to overlap.

And the goal strategically is to see who can get the most pieces on the board before all the spaces are gone. So there's a lot of strategy involved.

What I love is that, one, there's no words in this game, which means that your kids who are not readers yet, they can totally play. And you can play big kids against little kids. The whole family can play.

Second, I love the fact that there just is so much geometry and spatial reasoning and mathematical thinking and problem solving going on as you're trying to figure out how to place these blocks.

But what I also love is that the number of ways to play with the game when you're not playing the game is huge. The reason this game has been a favorite in our homeschool for years is not because of the actual game, although we do like playing it. It is because there are so many ways to play with these pieces on this board.

So I've had kids who will create patterns. I've had them create a grid -- see if they can put all the colors together and how they can make squares. I've also had them figure out how they can create multicolored patterns because there's blue, green, yellow and red. I've had them line up all the pieces along the floor. I've had them look at -- because there's different sizes of pieces -- you know, there's some that are really tiny like this and then there's big ones like this. I've had them stacked pieces on top of each other too.

It's amazing to me how many ways they figured out to play with these very simple pieces. That's what I love about it. I'm going to invest in a game that can be a family game, but the kids can get out and they can play with it any time, even if they're all by themselves, and my kids did.

All of my kids played with this game and continue to play with this game. The one caveat I will give you is there are, of course, lots of actual pieces. So if you have little babies, you'll want to figure out a way to keep it out of that. And we were really good about taking the pieces and putting them in Ziploc bags and storing them in the game so that we could keep track of everything. Because this is a tiny little piece you can't play without it, and it would be really easy to lose. So we were really careful about that.

But other than that, man, this is an amazing game. I strongly recommend it for your family and your homeschool. If it sounds like something you'd be interested in, then click on the link up above or down below, you know, wherever you're watching this video and check it out. Because anytime you can have a game that has so many different purposes and so many different ways to play, it's going to be a win for your family. I'm ToriAnn Perkey, and I make these videos every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.

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