Interesting Homeschool Activity Cards
If your kids are like mine they love cards. You can play so many great games with a simple deck of cards. And, of course, there are many types of flashcards available. Here are a few decks of cards you might not already be familiar with that could be great additions to your homeschooling resources.
The Elements:
The Elements:
These large cards provide a good deal of information about each element including where it’s located on the periodic table, a large full-color picture, and a short description. One of the activities we use these for is to have an elements scavenger hunt. Of course, there are a number of ordinary items in your house that contain the elements and a surprising number of items that contain even fairly obscure elements, like the americium in your smoke detector! You can even use these cards to re-create your own periodic table of the elements. Make sure you have enough floor space! These cards can be used in conjunction with Theodore Gray’s Elements Vault.
U.S. States Flash Cards:
U.S. States Flash Cards:
These cards picture the state as well as its location in the United States on one side and the name of the state, abbreviation, and capital on the other side. We used these to play a game of identifying the states by their shapes. It makes a great lead-in to other interesting facts about the shapes of the states that are described in Mark Stein’s book How the States Got Their Shapes.
The World Game:
The World Game:
This card game is a great way to introduce some world geography into your homeschooling. Each card depicts the country’s flag and provides statistics on the country’s area, population, highest point, and neighboring countries. There are several games you can play with the cards including challenges to name the continent of the country, identify the country by its flag, and identify the capital of the country. The cards also come with a foldout map of the world indicating the countries by numbers that correspond to the numbers on the cards.
Fabula:
Fabula:
If your kids are storytellers or writers this deck of cards would be very useful. The deck contains 42 cards which provide tools for outlining stories based on the three-act structure and the archetypes of myth and tales. They also provide a great tool for analyzing stories or movies that often follow some variation on these structures. The Hero’s Guidebook: Creating Your own Hero’s Journey by Zachary Hamby is a great companion book to these cards.
Critical Thinking Cards:
Critical Thinking Cards:
This is a great resource for introducing critical thinking to kids. The deck contains 24 fallacy cards and 24 bias cards each of which briefly describes a specific fallacy or bias. There are also 3 game cards describing specific games you can play with the cards. Or you can make up your own games. There are also several “call out cards” that you can give someone if their arguments or claims are “so full of fallacies and dodgy logic that it would take too long to identify all of them.” These would pair well with Julie Bogart’s book Raising Critical Thinkers.
Famous Failures: The game of Persistence
Famous Failures: The game of Persistence
This is a Go Fish card game where each card contains a famous person who failed many times before succeeding. So often, kids see successful people and they don’t realize that they are seeing the result of years of hard work, practice, and failure. In reality, most of those people did not have an easy road to success and this game provides a useful life lesson about learning from failure and perseverance.
Our Moments Cards:
Our Moments Cards:
Finally, this deck of cards is simply designed to help you have interesting conversations with your kids. There are 100 cards in the deck, each containing a question designed to start a conversation. Some are very simple such as “What’s your favorite movie? Why?” “Name 3 foods you would never eat.” Others invite more reflection such as “If you could have one dream come true, what would it be?” Or, “Is there something I can do better that I am not doing now?”
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.