 Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallach Way. I'm Jessica. And today's video is going to be a game school video. Three years ago, I did a series where I shared all of our favorite games off of our game shelf by subject. And I'm doing that again because you guys have been asking for it forever. Now yesterday, the first video in this series aired and it was all about math games which I will link up here for you guys in case you missed it. Today's video is going to be all about language arts games. Gonna be sharing all of our favorite games that have to do with spelling, reading, writing and parts of speech. So I hope you are ready. I feel like math and language arts are the two subjects that we struggle with to make fun the most in our homeschool. So I wanted to start there with those two for you guys. These games are in absolutely no particular order. I'm just going to grab and share. The first one we have here is Read My List. It includes 200 double-sided cards and you're basically choosing a level, listening to a list and then trying to remember what you heard, thinking quick and coming up with the category for it. So for example, if I was to read out the lists, Brie, Jack, Colby, Provolne, Goat, Swiss, Gouda, Parmesan, you would have to say that the category is cheese, obviously for that one. So there's list cards and then there's category cards. So it's just a lot of fun because there's a couple of different ways that you're going to play that one, two different levels if you will. Word around, you guys, this one gets played all the time here, like all the time. Basically, you're going to have a stack of cards with a color on top. They're either going to be the blue, red or the black. When you see this card and you get ready to flip it over, it's blue. So you're going to look at the blue ring. Within the blue ring, there is going to be a word. I can't read it backwards, but there's going to be a word basically that goes in a circle here. So, oh, that word is garden. And whoever calls it out first gets to keep the card. Whoever has the most cards at the end wins. It was a great, great way to help Emily see spelling in a different way, to help her think outside the box because you always see words left to right in a circle was very, very difficult when we first started playing. I would literally count to 20 before I would even look at the card because it was a huge learning curve for her. But then once she got it, she got it and she absolutely loves it. Now we all play and it's like a challenge to see who can win. But that's a way you can kind of make it easier at first because you're literally trying to teach a kid to read around after having taught them to read in a line for forever. So it's going to be a challenge in the beginning. Next we have Possum. This plays very, very similar to Yahtzee except you're not going for things like ones, twos, threes and fours. You're going for nouns, verbs, adjectives and then like any five and six letter word. So here's your score sheet and you can see you're trying to get a three letter noun or a three letter verb or a four letter adjective. So you're rolling dice but the dice are letters instead of numbers. Because Yahtzee is one of Kevin and Emily's favorite games I thought this would be a fun way to keep the same gameplay in our homeschool but focusing on a different skill or concept like you know, a different subject. And I was right. It's been absolutely perfect for doing just that. Next we have Super Sleuth. This has been one that we have absolutely loved. We've played this for years. It is so cute because you get this little like decoder magnifying glass and that's how you can see what the answer on each card is. But it's just a fun game. You collect little super sleuth badges when you get ones correct. But it's a great way to practice synonyms, antonyms, homophones and multiple meaning words. So if you're looking for a way to practice those in your homeschool this is a perfect game for that. Next we have the Classic Boggle. This is an amazing way to practice spelling again because you have to think outside the box because your words may not just always be in a line left to right. They might be up and down or diagonal or in that funny L shape. So it's a great way to focus on spelling and seeing things from a different angle. Miss Bernard is a wild card. This is from, I think it's, yeah, My Weird School which is a book series. It's got kind of some of the same characters in it. But what you're trying to do is collect cards to make a sentence. And each sentence has to have a teacher, a rhyme, an action, an adjective and a noun. So it was a really good way to practice parts of speech and what completes a sentence but in a really fun and funny way because then you read your sentence at the end and they're normally hilarious. A little wordy, this is a two-player game. I bought it literally because it was a two-player game because finding games that play well with two players are sometimes difficult but it ended up being one that me and Emily absolutely loved and we play all the time. So you get letter tiles from the very beginning and using the letter tiles you're given you pick a word and then your opponent is trying to guess that word. Think like hangman kind of almost but you have these little cards with these little birds that have actions that can help you like you wanna buy a vowel or how long is the word, how many letters is it? Or what is the last letter? So it reminds me of like hangman meets will of fortune. Mad Libs the game, we absolutely love Mad Libs so this game is perfect. It is a really, really fun game. If you like Mad Libs you should add it to your collection. It's a great way to practice parts of speech. The listography game, it's a really, really fun kind of party type game because you're racing to create lists based off of a range of topics. It can be anything from geography to pizza toppings but you actually have to, I don't know if you can see that but you actually have to write and so that was the reason I initially purchased it just because it would encourage him later, right? But it also has some serious vocabulary and spelling skills as well and you're trying to keep them all within a category so that is a really fun thing too. Blurt is another one that we absolutely love. You have to think fast paced. You have to come up with a word to say a word that means that. So for example, you roll a dice and you get a number and so on the back of one of the cards I might say the nut of an oak tree. The first person to scream acorn gets that one. The place where coins are made would be the mint and so as you are answering, you're racing around the board and the first person who gets to the end is the winner because they obviously answered the most correctly and they got to the end. That one, you do have to have at least three players for so Kevin has to play with us and he actually really enjoys that one too. Upwards is probably one of my favorite word games and I really love word games you guys. It reminds me a lot of Scrabble. Some of the things I like more than Scrabble is that you can stack them on top of each other and that the board itself rotates which makes it really easy. Yes, I know I could get one of those lazy students for the table for Scrabble but the fact that they thought ahead and did that in the game itself is a win in my opinion. And then on that note, because I just mentioned it, I'm going to go ahead and pick up Scrabble because while I like a lot of things about upwards better, I like the math that's added into Scrabble that upwards doesn't have like the double and triple letters or the double words and things like that. Upwards and Scrabble are both very fun. I like them both. If you want to play Scrabble and not have to deal with all the additional spaces, upwards is the perfect game for you. If you like the math behind that and you like being able to score a larger then Scrabble is for you. But they're both really good and I like them both and we play them both probably equally as much. Word on the street, you guys, this is probably hands down one of my favorite language arts games. We had Word on the Street Junior for probably three or four years and then we upgraded to Word on the street. It is essentially, let's see, a tug of war. You end up with this big long street and it has letters, like little skateboard letters and you either have two players or two teams and you have a category card. So let's say the category is pizza toppings and you say cheese, then they're gonna take the C, the H, E, E, S, E. Now on Word on the street, sorry, on this Word on the street, it does not include any vowels which makes it more difficult to win because you are only taking the consonants up the board. Word on the street, Junior, includes all letters A through Z, making it a little bit easier to win. Now, what I did before Emily was ready to come up with words in a category and spell them as I didn't use the category cards that come with the game at all, like I didn't even pull them out. Instead, I wrote words exactly as they were, mostly sight words on index cards and put them in the box. And so we would take turns pulling out a sight word and we would spell it and whoever got the things off the board or little street first was the winner, but it was a great way to practice sight words with a game that we already had on hand and then being able to grow into the game later and then upgrade to the next version. So that is what I did with the original Word on the street. You could really use it with any spelling words. Like if you have spelling words that you use in your home school, it's a great way to practice them. So if you already have it on the shelf, pull it out, use index cards or a spelling list or whatever and just take turns doing that and it makes it a lot more fun. All right, over here we have dabble. It is basically the first player to spell five words using 20 tiles as the winner. It is a lot of fun. It is like, I don't know. I don't even know what it's like. I would say it's like upwards on steroids maybe, but it's really not even the same because you're only working with yours and not playing off other people's, but it's a lot of fun. We have grasping grammar. This is a board game that works on all eight parts of speech, nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. It is kind of a basic board game. It may not be the favorite game in our house. It's not gonna get picked for family game night. I'm gonna tell you that right now. This is definitely a game school game. It's a school-y thing, but it's a lot more fun than a worksheet. So if I was to be like, hey Emily, do you wanna play this for your parts of speech or do you wanna do a worksheet? She's gonna pick this every time. But it is, I mean, it's definitely a school-y game if that makes sense. And I'm sure those of you who buy games know what I'm talking about. Breaking news. This is a spelling punctuation in grammar game, but it reminds me the gameplay of clue because you're trying to get to each of the different rooms of the newspaper to have something or do something when you're in that room to basically be able to get the paper to print. So you're doing punctuation spelling, verb tense, sentence, grammar and vocabulary. And then you have all of the different parts of the newspaper like the weather central and the sports department and the business. And you're having to answer questions on these cards for each department as you go to them. And then you can go to the next one. So like, let's see if I can read one. So entertainment news has things like which sentence is spelled correctly, which conjunction is most suitable for the following sentence, fill in the blank. So it's ones like that. It is definitely a game of school game, but that one does get picked for family game night because it plays like clue, which we all really love. So I would say that one is probably in the middle of our list if we were picking. Tall Tales, this is one Emily has been playing since she was probably three or four years old and it is one she will pull off the shelf every single time if she's allowed. It is basically a storytelling game with infinite possibilities. So you have all of these cards which are like places or settings. And then you have all of these little figurines or people and their actual pieces. So it has the game itself comes with 24 cards and 50 little game pieces. And then I actually purchased more, they call them environments of the environment cards. So you have a bag full of just all of these little like sayings, like here's a little car or a little birdie, a little dragon. And so you use these little pieces and the little environment cards and you come up with a story. Emily loves it and she would tell stories using it all day long. There's five different ways to play but they're all some sort of storytelling type of game. So if you have a kid who loves storytelling or you wanna work on storytelling or even writing because there have been times that we've done the story and then I've jotted it down for her or I've had her write it. It really is one of the best storytelling and we've had a lot over the years storytelling cards and everything else. This is the one that stood the test of time in our homeschool. Next, we have Spelligator. This is a really, really fun game for younger kids. It reminds me of upwards, but a little bit easier because a lot of your phonic, phonetic things are together. Like you can see here, like the two L's are gonna be on a tile together. They can stack up. You're not playing on other people's words, you're only playing on the Gator that's in front of you, that's yours. So if you as an adult like things like Scrabble and Upwards and you have a younger kid who needs help on spelling, then this would be a great game because it's not one that you're gonna absolutely hate and it's one that's gonna help your kid because like I said, they have like, for example, P and H would be on one together for phone or the double L's and things like that. It makes it easier to build the words for them. All right, and last up, we are down to the smaller ones that fit inside these containers. We have silly sentences. This was just one of those where you make a sentence using nouns and verbs and adjectives and it tells you what it is at the top. So you have like a verb or an adjective or a noun. This is wacky, funny, crazy, corny, goofy, silly sentences. I think I bought this from Rainbow Resources one time when they had a clearance on it. I don't even know if it exists anymore but you could totally make your own by just index cards and writing a bunch of verbs and adjectives and nouns and hang on, I will read you the rules really quick. Let's see. The object of the game is to use five cards to make a sentence. Sentences may be made several ways using two adjectives, two nouns, two verbs or two nouns and two verbs. So basically you're gonna shuffle and you're gonna draw five cards and then you're gonna keep drawing and discarding until you can make a sentence and whoever makes the sentence first wins but it doesn't have to be that way when you are playing. Next up we have last letter, which is a really interesting game but I absolutely love it. So you have cards that are very abstract and if I was to lay this card down and say dog because there's a dog in it, then the next card that Emily or whoever would lay down has to use something in their card that starts with what my card ended with. So I said dog, so that would mean G. So here I'm gonna say genius because they look like genius scientists in a lab. Okay, so now S, so based off of this one you could say something like sport because that starts with an S. It's really, really a fun game. It's one of those that kind of gets your brain firing. You have to think about the word that the person said. You have to know what the last letter is and then you have to find some way to interpret your card using that. So that's a lot of fun. Next we have Scrabble Slam, which essentially is just a card version of Scrabble except you can lay cards on top of other cards. So it is like Scrabble and upwards combined in a card game. So if you're short on space then that might be what you want. We really love this one too. It's another spelling based game. It's called Quiddler Junior. You could probably just buy Quiddler if you have older kids. I could probably just buy Quiddler now but I have the junior and it works so we're just gonna keep playing it. But it's a similar based game where you have cards and you're trying to spell words with them. Like I said, depending on the age of your child I would probably, unless they're like five or six I would just buy Quiddler and skip the junior version but we have this and so that's what we're just gonna keep using. Now that is the majority of our favorite language arts games that we play the most in our home school. I would love it if you would tell me what games you play for language arts down in the comments because I'm always looking to add to my game school library and then I'm gonna go ahead and tell you our top five language arts games that get the most play in our home school so you know which ones that maybe you want to look at adding the most. So in no particular order for the five I would say our top five are upwards, a little wordy, super sleuth, word around and word on the street with possum and super sleuth probably being tied for the fifth position, that's hard. We're gonna go with six, we're gonna go with six for this video. That's our top six language arts games.