Educating Risa

I’ve mentioned before that Daegan loves puzzles and riddles of all kinds—from Dr. Dooriddles (review forthcoming!) in language arts to kakuro and  Math Analogies to chemistry / geography puzzles. They make learning more fun! Both Jim and I were the same way as kids, and as adults we’ve come to believe even more in the benefits of a flexible mind, a mind that enjoys puzzling over things and thinking from different perspectives and angles. So including lots of these sorts of activities is an important part of our homeschooling.

Two resources Daegan and I are currently working with are Logic Links and Analogy Challenges, both from MindWare. Logic Links uses punch-out paper chips that are to be arranged according to various clues. It’s probably easiest to explain in pictures:

There are several things I like about this resource. I like that it uses paper chips—no writing (and erasing, and writing, and erasing…). I like that it is simple enough for Daegan to use on his own, as it lists the chips to be used in each puzzle first, and then the clues. We don’t do these every day by any means, but from time to time they are a fun way to break up other work, or to occupy Daegan while I work one-on-one with Gareth for a few minutes. The boys (ages 7 and 5) have also done the puzzles together, with Daegan reading the clues aloud to Gareth. These puzzles are challenging enough for my older child, yet because they involve moving concrete physical objects, simple enough for my younger to participate and determine if an answer is right or wrong.

The second resource we’ve been using is Analogy Challenges. We’re working through the Beginner Level, which includes a mix of pictorial and word puzzles:

The first half of the book is pictorial, the second uses words. We got to the halfway point today, which had one page of each type:

Here’s a close-up of some picture analogies:

And I liked how the word analogies involve a bonus analogy to “unscramble”. Daegan thought that was really cool!:

Again, we don’t work from this book every day, but as something playful and different it’s been great. If you know of similar resources—books, websites, computer games, whatever—please leave me a comment. Thanks!