A dear friend of mine introduced me to this game, which I play with my kids every now and then. All you need is a set of Scrabble tiles. You place all of the tiles face down, and swirl them around. The dealer (ordinarily the best player, so it distracts him), flips one tile at a time. When enough tiles are flipped to create a word of at least three letters, the first player to name the word claims it, and takes it for himself.

Play continues, with more tiles flipped, but there are two choices now for the tiles that are face up. You can use the tiles to create new words, or combine them with existing words of yours, or words of your opponents. Suppose your opponent has the word “ham,” and there are an “s” and an “e” on the board. The player that calls out “shame” claims the tiles from “ham” and creates the word “shame” in his field. Stealing the words of opponents is often more effective than creating new words, though there is a balance to be maintained. It is also wise to boost the letters in your own words, which makes them harder to steal. Additional note: the letter orders can be rearranged. If “gun” and “one” have been claimed by players, and there is a “d” on the board, a player could take the two words for the word “dungeon.”

Play ends two minutes after the last tile is flipped. Additional rules:

• No proper nouns
• No foreign words, unless they are in common use in English discourse.
• Appeal to an unabridged dictionary is permitted for words in dispute.
• Blanks are wild cards, but the first time a blank is played, it stays that letter for the remainder of the game.

Scoring: each word gets points equal to the number of letters minus two.

Benefits of the game: children learn to think along multiple lines of strategy and structure words in ways that they don’t commonly consider. It is a real mind-stretcher. An aside: this is a game where speed of thought helps but is not determinative. Having a large vocabulary helps, which benefits the grownups.

An off-topic post for the weekend.  My children have benefited from a card-matching game called “SET.”  The main SET website is here, and the rules are here.

What I find interesting about the game is that the optimal strategy forces you to look for linear patterns early and then shift to nonlinear patterns later in each round.  It’s a very mathematical game, and the cards are functionally equivalent to unique 4-digit base three numbers.  (Don’t tell the kids that, or it won’t be fun any more.)

Full disclosure: I just like the game, and so do my kids.  I have received nothing for mentioning here, but it could be of value to parents and grandparents.

2007 is the transition year at the Merkel household.  Our two oldest children go off to college in the fall, and our youngest starts home schooling at the same time.  As such, this is the last time that we can rely on that we will be able to take all of our children on a trip.  In the late summer of 2006, we went to visit my wife’s parents in San Diego; next week, we visit my parents in Milwaukee.

Now, I have no idea what internet access I might have while there.  If I have good access, I will post in the late evenings.  If not, well, you’ll hear from me next on the 29th.  With that, I sign off.  I have a lot of other things to write about, but little time to do so.  Traveling with eight children is quite a feat, and it will take a lot of my energy to accomplish that.

This is a little out of the ordinary for those who frequent my blog, but here is something that my wonderful wife and I use to help our children learn math. If you did not already know, we homeschool our eight children. We are not big on math drill; we think word problems teach reasoning far better. But to do word problems effectively, the ability to have instant recall of the 100 math facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division is crucial.

We have our children work at it until they can get it perfect in five minutes in third grade, and three minutes in fifth grade.

To use the spreadsheet (right-click and use “save link as” to download), select the tab that you want to work on. “little add, and “little subt” are the 64 math facts with no number greater than 10. To use the sheet, hit the F9 key to recalculate the sheet, which places all the problems in a new random order. (You’ll never get 2 sheets the same.) Then hit the print icon. F9, print, F9, print, etc… pretty soon you’ll have a lot of unique sheets for drill purposes.

Use and distribute as you see fit. I just want to see children who are good with their math. And, if it works for you, let me know.