I never thought I’d be pandemic-schooling my kids. Homeschooling? That doesn’t scare me because I’ve done it before. But Pandemic-schooling is entirely different. The kids didn’t expect to leave school one day and find out they were not going back for the rest of the year.
In Virginia, in an effort to maintain equity, students have not been given *new* instructional material and 4th quarter is going to consist solely of review. While I understand the need here – there are many students who don’t have access to internet, devices and the infrastructure to school virtually – it has been a difficult transition for my kids. After a few weeks of redundancy, my 10 and 12 year old sat me down and told me that they feel like they are being punished because “we already did this work.”
So…we ditched the school curriculum and dove into our own. The girls started a literature study of Esperanza Rising. It’s a bit below their reading level, I was able to get my hands on a study guide for it, which means I don’t have to make it all up myself and the content of 1920s America/Mexico is interesting. The social studies component includes North, Central and South America.
Using Boardgames to reinforce topics
The 10-year-old got stuck one day on an Economics lesson in social studies. She read the material and when she started on a planning worksheet to divvy up natural, capital and human resources – she froze.
The task: Make a list of the natural, capital, and human resources of Mexico or Canada using Geography of the World as a resource. Then think about a business or industry that might benefit from the availability of those resources and write a short letter to potential investors explaining why your idea for a business will be a good fit with the country’s resources.
So we started a conversation about the different resources. I was grasping at ideas to explain the differences with enough examples that she would be able to always sort the resources…and suddenly it came to me..
“In Puerto Rico players assume the roles of colonial governors on the island of Puerto Rico. The aim of the game is to amass victory points by shipping goods to Europe or by constructing buildings. Each player uses a separate small board with spaces for city buildings, plantations, and resources.”(According to Boardgame Geek)
Aha!
1) Natural Resources – In order to ship goods to Europe, players first have to collect the natural resources from the island – corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee are the natural resources available in the game.
2) Capital Resources – Those resources can’t come straight out of the ground and go to Europe. Players have to turn their natural resources into goods they can actually ship.
3) Human Resources – People are a key component in this game – without occupying the plantations and buildings with people, you can’t collect the resources or turn them into shippable goods.
We’ve owned this game for a long time, but the youngest kids were too little to play it back when it made it onto the table regularly. It had been years since we’d played it, but in that moment I knew it was going to explain everything she wanted to know about natural, capital and human resources. We looked up images of the different natural resources and talked about how each good is transformed before being useful (except for corn – the game accounts for the fact that it doesn’t have to be processed like the other goods).
It was the action of *doing it* it that really stuck with her. She had to pull colonists off the boat and send them to factories, processing plants, and plantations in order to gather and process her natural resources. She owned indigo, coffee and tobacco plantations. She built tobacco storage sheds, indigo plants and coffee roasters. As she was building her “engine” she realized that without all of the components in place, she couldn’t turn her resources into viable goods. But once she made it through several turns, she started to make more money and gain victory points for shipping. In the end, she fully understood all of the components required to play the game AND do her assignment.
Boardgamegeek (the authority on boardgame geekery) gives it a complexity rating of 3.28 / 5 (medium weight) and recommends it for 12+. The relevance to our studies made it interesting for the kids and it wasn’t too complex for the 10-year-old. Plus, it has a simultaneous action function (essentially, everyone gets to play on every turn) which is the 10-year-old’s favorite game mechanic. She gets bored with strict Euros that require a lot of downtime between turns.
In the end, she devised a business called “Jewelry Girl” using the natural resources of silver and copper, the capital resources of a factory, a truck and a building, and human resources of a truck driver, a jeweler and a miner.
