Archive for the ‘kids do’ Category

Last December I walked in the door after a looooong day of working with my mom to see my husband and kiddos sitting in a circle looking like the photo above.

I had been up and out the door at 5:00 am and it was now 6:30 pm.  I took one look at my family and laughed myself silly.  They were playing the game Hedbanz, a gift that had just been delivered that evening from a friend.

That’s not the first time I’ve laughed hard while playing Hedbanz.  Our family loves to play.  The object of the game is to stick a card in your headband without looking at it, then ask questions to help you guess what you are before the sand timer runs out.  The first person that guesses three cards wins the game.  The cards are objects, food or animals.  Playing with kids can get interesting when you are something like a hamburger and ask “Am I an animal?” and they all say yes… you can spend a lot of time not realizing that you were an animal.

Our family has a tradition that every year for Thanksgiving we get a new game.  I’m not a Black Friday shopper, so Thanksgiving weekend is usually spent in PJ’s, playing games, watching movies, sewing and making Christmas gifts.

Since I just picked up Scrabble, this year’s game, I thought I should share a few more games we love to play:

There’s Hedbanz of course.

We also received Bananagrams as a gift this past year and love it.  It’s a crossword game where each player is racing to use up all their tiles to win the game.  I love that even younger kids (beginning spellers) can play (though not competitively with an adult) and it really helps their spelling skills as well as strategy.  It comes in the small and handy banana bag you see, which means it’s a perfect game to take on vacation.  We spent some fun evenings playing it at our family’s Ranch vacation this past summer.

The other word game I LOVED playing at the Ranch was:

Quiddler is awesome.  We’ve had it for a few years, but our kids have been too young to enjoy it.  This past year they finally got the hang of it. It’s still enough of a challenge, that its not usually their first pick to play.

I, on the other hand, love to play Quiddler.  When the adults played it at the Ranch, the games were VERY competitive!  Thank goodness for dictionary apps, or a few of us might have gotten away with creating a some interesting new words.

The object is to use all the letter cards in your hand to create words.  Each card has a point value that gets added if it’s used in a word and subtracted if it doesn’t.  Each round you receive one more card and the game gets more interesting.

If you have older children, say 11 and up, or want a game to play with adults, I highly recommend Quiddler.

Last year for Thanksgiving, I was able to find Clue… the real old school Clue… as in Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlett kind of Clue.  That has been a family favorite all year.

If you’d like to read about a few of our other favorite games I wrote about them here and here.

It’s one of my favorite days of the year.

We pulled off costumes with MUCH less effort than in years past.  Yeah!  No sewing until 1:00 AM on Halloween’s Eve.  Lots of hot glue and lots done by my kids.

But the costumes still turned out wonderfully… and cheaply thanks to recycled dance clothes, used sheets and granddad’s old military uniform.

Emma’s mummy costume required the only scant sewing that needed to be done.  She was able to do some of the sewing on the machine herself… which was fun for her and nice for me.

My son’s 5th Grade (and the 6th Grade too) hosts a wax museum every Halloween, which means his costume needed to be a notable American.  He chose Major Richard D. Winters of Band of Brothers fame and a hero of World War II.

My son loves World War II history just like I do.  As part of the Wax Museum, Ben wrote a report about Winters.  Each student answers questions about his/her character when the other students and parents wander through the museum.

Next year for 6th grade he’ll choose an international historic person for his costume for the wax museum…  maybe Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, or Sir Isaac Newton?  Knowing my son, it’ll be another soldier- Genghis Khan or Richard II here we come.

I hope your Halloween is deliciously scary and fun.

Happy Haunting!