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September 27, 2006
Board games galore
Have I mentioned the "basement games?" Dad brought up a bunch of games from Tulip, at Jeff's request. Things like Sorry, Clue, Monopoly, Othello... all the old favorites. Well, Ethan's been having a field day with them. He'll play them all day long if we let him. At least there's a lot of choices now, so Mom and Dad don't get too bored. Mancala is my favorite one to play, because the stones are so nice. But he doesn't like that one as well as some of the others. He's always begging to play Monopoly - so far we've always played the shorter version where you start by dealing out the cards. It still takes forever, but not as long as Risk, which we've only done once so far. He also loves Acquire, which Jeff's dad gave us a few years ago and we really hadn't played until Ethan got into it.
I guess the good side of all these capitalist-oriented games with money is that he's gotten even better at adding, subtracting, and making change. And he's really internalized the way that knowing 2+2=4, for example, helps him know 20+20=40. I mean REALLY. Yesterday he was doing one of his running commentaries in the morning, I forget what it was about, but I heard him say, "So, what's 20+20+20+20? 80!" Or.... what was the other one? Oh, yeah, he can figure out how to give Daddy $75 in Monopoly money in about 2 seconds. Three twenties makes 60, plus 10, plus 5. Boom. He uses counting by 2's to count by 20's, he counts by 50's to add stuff quickly. It makes sense - it's just building on what he already knew. But it still surprises me sometimes.
Posted by ktingey at September 27, 2006 10:05 AM