Friday. Game Day!

Today, we spent about 2/3 of the class periods working. Kids in the even period blocks are working well for me and getting some great stuff done. Most of them are working through an entire period, without a break and without lots of prompting. The last 1/3 of the class periods, we spent playing. This amounted to about 25 minutes or so, but I think that it went well.

In the first two classes, because they are a little bigger, we primarily played Blokus, a Tetris-type abstract shape placement game. In the game, players try to get their all their pieces placed onto a board, following some simple rules. The player who gets most of their pieces on the board, wins. The kids seemed to like it. You can actually play it online. If you are interested, check The Blokus Website. Follow the "Direct Play" link and "Play as Guest." I even have some kids coming by after school to try the game online.

Sixth Period is a very small class, with only 13 kids, so I broke out a bunch of games. One group was playing Blokus, two kids were playing Dvonn, two other kids were playing Batik and two more were playing Zertz. All of these are rather simple abstract games, but they will challenge the brain and got the kids thinking and talking. I enjoyed it.

Oh, and Highland High has their first home football game against Wiggins tonight. We should beat them pretty soundly. After all, they only have about 220 kids in their school and we have 246! I get to help with announcing. I think that I will be the "spotter." More about that later.