Tag Archives: games

USAopoly Games Review

Games We Recieved:

Wonky: The Crazy Cubes Card Game

Ages: 8 to Adult
2 or more players
Retails for $19.95

Wonky Game Includes:

9 Blue and Green Wonky Blocks; 54 Strategy Cards; Storage Bag to keep the blocks in; and Instructions.

If you like to build painstakingly, and don’t mind your creation leaning like the Tower of Pisa, this game is for you!

Each block is a confusing optical illusion as they are shaped normal on three sides and the other sides are curved and it causes the tower to wobble when a big block is placed on top of a smaller block.

The goal is to cause your opponents to make the tower fall and force them to have as many cards in their hands as possible at the end of the game as you stack a large block on a small one and make the tower wobble! Two cards work in your favor, the reverse play card and the pass card, forcing those around you to take a turn instead of you. The first player to get rid of all their cards without causing the tower to fall, wins the game.

AWARDS:

Awards Won By Wonky (source)

How We Used WONKY in our home:

My kids love to build, BUT they are used to building with things with flat, even surfaces. WONKY is completely wonky!

It takes a lot of skill and patience to stack a misshaped block and keep the tower of blocks from falling over.

You literally concentrate and hold your breath with every block you stack on top!

This is a great game and so fun for several ages to play together. You really don’t have an advantage if you are older in this one! Lots of concentration and slowing down to find the right spot to place your block and stack them while following the clue cards. We would definitely encourage our friends to look into getting this fun game for this family.

Now if speed is more your style, you might want to give Tapple a try.

Tapple: Fast Word Fun For Everyone

Ages: 8 to Adult
2-8 Players
10-20 minutes play time, depending on how many rounds you play.
Retails for $19.95

Tapple Game Includes:

The Tapple Letter Wheel, 36 Category Cards (each card has 4 categories =144 categories total), and Instructions.

Tapple is a game of speed and word association. You have 10 seconds to name a word in a category and beat the timer. BUT watch out because you only get 10 seconds to think of your word and the first letter of the word must match an available letter on the wheel. There are 20 Letters available of the alphabet and six letters, (Q,U,V,X,Y,Z,) have been left off the wheel. If the timer expires before you can think of a word, your turn in that round is over. The last person to finish a round wins the category card. The person with the most category cards at the end wins the game. You can decide ahead of time if you plan to include all categories in a game, or limit the number of categories, for example, limit to 3 or 5.

This is a fantastic game and has won many awards in several categories.

Awards:

Awards won by Tapple (source)

How we used Tapple in our home:

This game is hilarious! We used this game as a supplement to our Language learning skills for the whole family. Basically you have a random category on a card and everyone has to come up with a word for that category card that begins with one of the letters on the Tapple wheel. If the letter has already been used, it cannot be used again in that round. Each player takes a turn saying a word that starts with a letter available on the wheel. After they say a word in the category that matched an available letter, then the player taps the timer and the play starts for the next player. If you don’t answer within 10 seconds, the timer ends and that player looses the round. If a player looses a round, they cannot begin to play again until the entire category round is through and there is a clear winner. You win the round by being the last person standing and receive the category card.

The kids had so much fun with this game. It gets more and more challenging as the common letters are used up and you still need to find a new word to match an available letter.

With this game, age is an advantage. The older you are, the more words you will likely know and also the factor of thinking ahead for your turn, you can kind of plan out what you are going to say if there are several players in a round. So at our house, if 8 of us are playing, you will have about 80 seconds or less to figure out your word (each player gets 10 seconds or less). When the game gets down to just a few players left, it goes very quickly. We definitely enjoy playing this game and would encourage every homeschool family to have one on hand.

When not in game mode, you can use this one on one with a younger child and teach them words that start with a letter. We did this and just did not use the timer for this activity.

Social Media

Be sure to follow USAopoly on their social media sites for all the latest news, special sales, and product updates. Be sure to check out USAopoly’s blog. They do giveaways!

Blog: http://usaopoly.com/blog
Twitter https://twitter.com/USAopoly
Instagram https://instagram.com/usaopoly/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/usaopoly
Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/usaopoly/

Check out what other homeschool families on the TOS Review Crew had to say about using USAopoly Games in their homes.

Please share.

Super Teacher Worksheets

Membership $19.95 year

Grades K-5, but there are many worksheets for middle and high school too, and more will be developed for the upper grades.

Unlimited 24/7 Access to over 10,000 pdf worksheets, activities, flash cards, games, and more.

New worksheets are added each week.

“Members have unlimited access to thousands of worksheets and printable materials on Super Teacher Worksheets. We offer math worksheets, reading comprehension stories, spelling lists, handwriting practice sheets, grammar worksheets, holiday printables, and much more!” source

Screenshot (127)

Just A Few Of The Subjects Covered:

There are wonderful high quality printables for more subjects than I can tell you about. It is really mind boggling just the number of worksheets and resources on this site. But here is a short list of some of the subject areas covered.

Math
Reading & Writing
Phonics & Early Literacy
Handwriting
Grammar
Spellings Lists & Worksheets (Gr. 1-5)
Science
Social Studies
Geography
History
Holiday
Health and Nutrition
Puzzles & Brain Teasers
Games
Flash Cards
Teacher Helpers
Pre-K and Kindergarten Resources
Make Your Own Worksheets

Super Teacher Worksheets company was created by Tim Weibel in 2007. Tim worked as a 3rd and 4th grade elementary school teacher for over 10 years and saw a need for easy access to affordable high quality worksheets for teachers and parents.

How We Are Using Super Teacher Worksheets In Our Home

I am so excited to have this resource! It has enhanced what we are doing. If I want the kids to practice more on certain skills we have a worksheet for that. If I want them to do a quiz, I can find several worksheets to cover it. If I want to expand their learning with unit study on a specific subject, I have found so many great resources on this website that I can include to further the learning. I am just thrilled!

We are using these worksheets to supplement almost every subject of our learning this fall. So far I have printed off math, language arts, phonics, spelling, history, geography, nutrition, and found worksheets for our dinosaur unit study, human body unit study, and more.

There is something to go along with everything you are doing, and if something isn’t there, you can create your own using the tools on the site too. There is also a feature for the kids to create their own calendars. I can’t wait to be able to use these worksheets for the up coming holiday season this fall. These resources will give a nice touch to our learning during the holidays too.

We are studying the History and Geography of the USA. I found maps of the USA and some with latitude and longitude coordinates. The kids had to use the clues to locate the city and state the meet the coordinates listed. I found a wonderful State Report for the kids to work on. The report is about 9 pages long and there are interesting things to do on each page that relate to the state you are studying. We started off learning about Indiana state history and geography since we live in Indiana. Really proud of my 12 year old son’s handwriting. He is doing such a great job since taking a handwriting course, and all of these awesome worksheets are giving him plenty of hands on practice to implement his writing skills. I also saw there were handwriting worksheets to get in more practice and guided instruction as needed too. I plan to implement the handwriting worksheets with all the children next week.

My opinion is that every homeschool family (and anyone else working with kids) needs to subscribe to this program. There is so much to do and learn and the kids will have fun learning too.

More About Super Teacher Worksheets:

Members can make their own customized math worksheets, calendars, flashcards, quizzes, and word puzzles with the generators.

Members can save their favorite files in an online filing cabinet for easy access and to help save room on their own computer’s data storage. I usually just save the worksheet to a file in my own computer. This has really helped with planning out our learning schedule by having such easy access to these resources.

Look over their blog http://blog.superteacherworksheets.com/ for ongoing CONTESTS, GIVEAWAYS, FREE learning resources, and great ideas. They write great articles to help parents and teachers and have given away microscopes, science kits, and all kinds of great stuff so keep an eye out for what is happening over there.

Super Teacher Worksheets also has a site called ModernChalkboard.com with SMART Board Notebook resources for teachers.

Social Media

Be sure to follow Super Teacher Worksheets on their Social Medial links for all the latest news and updates.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/superteacherworksheets/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/superteacherwks/

Instagram: https://instagram.com/superteacherworksheets/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/superteacherwks/

Now that you read what we think about these wonderful worksheets, be sure to check out what other homeschool families on the TOS Revew Crew had to say about using this product in their home.

Please share.

Spring!

2 Replies

Oh can it really be true? I sure hope it is! What a difference a few days make. Just a week ago, we were playing games indoors, and if we went outside we had to be bundled head to toe in our heaviest winter gear.

But it was just too cold to stay out and play for long, and most of our free time was spent doing this:

and this:

and building this:

and more of this:

Now this week the weather has improved and we can go outside with light jackets! No more heavy coats! We can enjoy the sunshine. Spring has begun even though it’s official day isn’t until next week. It is still a little chilly if the wind is blowing, but it is so beautiful and I love that there is more color than just white!