Teenager-Friendly Wholesome Family Activities: Hunt a Killer

Do y'all have any weird, low-impact parenting things that you nevertheless feel a ton of constant guilt about?

Mine is the fact that I don't really like playing games.

Like, I played games with the kids all the time when they were little, and did the whole Family Game Night thing semi-regularly. Late night games are part of our New Year's Eve tradition, etc. But in those cases, playing the game is mostly about playing the game WITH THE KIDS, or, you know, AS A FAMILY. I wouldn't necessarily choose to play any given game if it wasn't a #wholesomefamilyactivity. 

I mean, I'd rather be reading?

So we don't really play games unless I feel like it's one of those super special #wholesomefamilyactivity moments, and I constantly feel guilty about this. 

Will and Matt are pretty amiable about games and like to play them, but Syd has, I think, a similar game mindset. 

And yet, she found a game that we're obsessed with.

Syd and I are both into true crime shows--although to be honest the Intro to Serial Killers class that Syd is currently taking at the local community college might have broken us of this. It's... a lot of graphic details. Like, a LOT. And there's, like, a huge list of paraphilias whose definitions Syd was tested on and so now I can't get them out of my head.

Did you know that there's a whole thing involving somebody wanting somebody else to... you know what? You're probably better of not knowing.

ANYWAY, because we both like true crime shows (although maybe not as much now as we used to...), Syd gave me this Hunt a Killer game for Mother's Day. 

It was already the perfect Mother's Day gift, because it was an activity that we could do together. Syd is particularly good at the Mother's Day version of #wholesomefamilyactivity. 

But even better? The game is SO GOOD!

You play the role of a baby detective trying to solve their first crime. You're given the set up and circumstances and all the evidence, although some evidence is locked or password-protected and some evidence isn't evident that it's evidence and some evidence is unclear because the suspects used ciphers or other ways to conceal it. And some isn't even evidence, but stuff that might be evidence. 

So you're given all that, and then you just... solve the crime! In this particular game, Syd and I had to figure out if a beloved bar owner's death was murder or an accident, and if it was murder, who did it? How and why?

Syd and I made a whole evening out of it. We bought ourselves snacks and drinks and set up at the big family room table, and exiled Matt and Will elsewhere so that they didn't get any spoilers that would ruin the fun when they want to try the game.

We'd kind of thought that the game would only take an hour or so, because it's apparently one of the easiest in the entire Hunt a Killer collection, but, ummm... I think it took us nearly four hours to solve? And the whole time we were completely absorbed, absentmindedly eating Goldfish crackers (these giant Cheddar Jalapeno ones are the best) and figuring out clues and having stunning revelations and arguing over alibis and trying out different substitution ciphers and having an absolute ball.

Ooh, and there were awesome surprises! At one point I figured that just for a laugh I would Do a Thing and Syd was all, "OMG don't Do That Thing! Surely it's not a real thing, just a game thing, or if it is a real thing it's a different real thing and it will be so embarrassing!" But then, I Did the Thing and it WAS a real thing AND it was a game thing and Syd and I were shocked and delighted and I screamed out loud because I'm excitable and we're still talking about it. 

We LOVED it. It was SO FUN. 

The only downside to the game is that there's zero replay value because, you know, we solved the crime! But if you consider it a #wholesomefamilyactivity rather than a product, the spendiness is easier to bear, in the same way that I happily spend more on theater or concert tickets. And at some point Syd and I will successfully convince Matt and Will to play it (and then secretly time them so we can decide whether or not they're better detectives than us, but only tell them that we timed them if we win, of course), so that's double the value, and then if I get really lucky, maybe somebody on Craigslist has a different Hunt a Killer game and would be willing to trade. 

Or, I don't know... y'all got any mysteries that I can solve? I prefer mysteries with lots of interesting clues, a few ciphers, and zero paraphilias or horrifyingly traumatic details of graphic murders. My birthday is in August!

Puzzle Games That Teenagers Like: Izzi

I didn't actually mean for this to turn into a series, but the kids and I messed around with SO many logic games and puzzles and fidgets recently as we absolutely burned through The Great Gatsby audiobook (if you can listen to a book read by Sean Astin, LISTEN TO A BOOK READ BY SEAN ASTIN!) that it really got me thinking about them and the place that they've held in our homeschool high school. 

That place has been central. Absolutely essential. I know I've said this before, but so much of homeschooling high school is having conversations together, or absorbing content together that you're then going to have conversations about. Just last week, which was a short school week interrupted by some service learning and a day trip, we finished The Great Gatsby audiobook, then talked about it endlessly since, and watched a two-hour documentary on Frida Kahlo, then talked about it endlessly since. This week we'll be reading some history together, so we can talk about it endlessly, and some short fiction, which, yes, we'll then talk about endlessly. Over the past 10+ years of interacting with these two kids in meaningful conversation and the consumption of educational content, I've noticed that they pay more attention when they have something to do with their hands, and that they demonstrate more intellectual engagement when their hands are also engaged.

If they're the only people in their college lecture halls with drawing pads and crochet projects and fidgets, then so be it.

This puzzle, Izzi, is currently out of print (although ThinkFun has a different puzzle by the same name. Did they buy Izzi and rework it? Dunno!), but I have learned that it is a pattern puzzle--more specifically, an edge-matching pattern puzzle--and it's quite good on several levels. The colors and patterns are appealing, and like Shashibo, you can make interesting patterns and shapes with pleasing symmetry:

But like those pesky pentominoes that the kids and I also love, this beautiful pattern puzzle is also a legitimately challenging puzzle, with endless ways to just almost solve it... except for that one last piece!

I know that these puzzles have academic value, but I'd love to isolate the specific values that intersect with their appeal, and use those to tempt my teenagers into adjacent areas of study. I can clearly see the possibilities in computer programming and mathematics, but I haven't yet found a specific connection that would serve as a direct step from puzzle to further exploration.

And that's why I have so many books on puzzles, logic, and recreational mathematics on hold for me at my local university's library!

Logic Games Teenagers Like: Rush Hour

This game has just about endless replay value, which is great because it's made entirely of plastic and so will exist until the death of the Sun.

Syd discovered Rush Hour at a hands-on museum a few years ago. It was possibly our gateway into ThinkFun games, all of which we're obsessed with...

...and Rush Hour is no different!

Syd, especially, has always been SUPER into logic games, and she's solved every puzzle in the basic deck a couple of times. I actually check this game out from the local university's library and keep it for a couple of months until everyone is done playing with it, then I return it. Inevitably, I remember it again in a couple of years and check it out again and we play it all over again! I feel like this is a good way to get around the gross fact that this game is all plastic, and now I'm realizing that perhaps my great goal in life is to organize a local homeschool library of manipulatives and games so more families can share out their plastic crap instead of everyone buying their own plastic crap.

In our family homeschool, we've always played logic games or done handwork while listening to audiobooks. Syd, especially, absolutely has to multitask if she's going to be able to pay attention, and I think this is a nice way to incorporate some logic and reasoning study into our schoolwork. Logic and reasoning skills are terrific for math and writing!

If your kid, too, gets super obsessed with Rush Hour, reading about the history of its development is interesting and would be a good intro into encouraging them to design their own original game, or a different version of Rush Hour. The game varieties, like Rush Hour Safari or the two-player game, would also probably be high-interest and expand their skill set. 

Even if this game stood entirely alone, I still think it would have decent replay value because the basic card deck is large enough that you probably can't memorize the solutions between games. However, I'm also VERY interested in the expansion decks, and if we actually owned it, I'd be tempted to invest in this hard case that apparently holds a couple of the expansion decks as well as the full game, lets you travel with it (something that Syd would have been VERY up for when she was younger), and can replace entirely the crappy cardboard box that definitely actively tries to fall apart. 

Things I Bought for My Teenagers and They Liked: Shashibo

When I buy gifts for the kids Christmas stockings, I still like to include a sensory/open-ended fidget-type toy. Both of my kids are sensory seekers, and one, in particular, is also a fidgeter. They both like patterns and love logic games, although the logic games that they each prefer are very different.

These Shashibo, thanks to being embarrassingly spendy, were a bit of a gamble. The kids haven't aged out of a lot of sensory toys as much as they've aged out of the packaging and marketing for those toys, so I was having a hard time coming up with something that filled a sensorial need but would appeal to a couple of jaded teenagers. The Shashibo looked sophisticated--with a price point to match!--and when I researched I did note a lot of older kids and adults playing with them.

So I bought a set of four. And my teenagers like them!

Here's what we like about them:

They're fiddly.

You can make specific shapes and patterns, but you can also literally just fiddle with the Shashibo, and beautiful shapes and patterns just appear. The flipping and folding feel nice, as does the little tug to separate the magnets.

The patterns are appealing.

The way the color schemes work, there's always an interesting visual pattern to look at as you fiddle with the Shashibo. And when you land on a shape that you like, that's pretty, too, as is the color combo that makes up that shape. 

The Shashibo fit together to make bigger patterns.

This is personally my favorite part of the Shashibo, and the fuel of my great desire to own MORE SETS! The shape that you make with one cube will often work symmetrically with the same shape made with one or more of the other cubes, or different shapes will somehow nest interestingly inside another shape. If you're a pattern lover, it will make you very happy!

Repeating the patterns is challenging.

Syd is, like, a visual-spatial genius, so she usually helps me mimic a particular shape when I get stuck, since my own method for mimicking a shape is just to fiddle with it like I fiddled with the previous cube to get the previous shape.

Since we've got four cubes, whenever one of us lands on an interesting shape by fiddling with a single cube, there's always the question of how can we make that shape with the other cubes, too? But because whoever made the cool shape was usually just doing it through mindless fiddling, it's quite a lot of mental work, sometimes, to figure out how to purposefully mimic it with another cube.

Here's what I don't like about them:

They're EXPENSIVE!

OMG I'm literally embarrassed at how much I paid for these, and I will forever scour garage sales and thrift stores to add to my collection rather than buy anymore new, because I need that money for college tuition now.

They might not be super durable?

This isn't a complaint that I have about them, but a complaint that I've seen in some reviews. Some people say the stickers peeled off of theirs after a while, making the cubes unusable since the stickers are what make the folding possible. I dunno, though--we handle ours quite a bit, but we are always super careful with them, and we've made it to May with them looking brand-new still.

What I really need is for Shashibo to get into the educational supply game, like some of my other fun building toys have. I'd probably manage to justify a large set that was discounted for use in my homeschool, especially if it came with lesson plans and extension activities, something like what Zometools has. I have a BIG set of Zometools AND a bunch of their lesson plans and books of extension activities, and I didn't feel guilty at all about blowing my homeschool budget on them because (turn on the homeschool parent voice) they're EdUcAtIoNaL!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Bought a Vintage Disney Puzzle off of Ebay

So, you know, that's about how I'm doing during this pandemic!

I've actually been looking for this Disney Fantasy puzzle, manufactured in 1981, for decades. I don't really remember gobs and gobs from my childhood, but one of my most vivid--and happiest!--memories is working this puzzle with some of the adults in my life at my grandparents' giant wooden dining room table.

The funny thing is that I remember the puzzle being super challenging--like, it had EVERY Disney character on it! So many Disney characters!--but I was probably only about 5 or 6 years old. 

And the puzzle actually only has 300 pieces!

Fridays after our school day and Matt's work day have ended are what I've come to think of as Happy Hour. I set up a new puzzle and a podcast (Welcome to Night Vale or The Magnus Archives are current family favorites), or some coloring and an audiobook (we're currently medium-way through Dracula), or just crosswords and Syd's Spotify playlist (she's no longer heavy on the Billie Eilish!), and, most importantly for getting the kids' buy-in, SNACKS. Matt makes the adults cocktails, and we just hang out around the table and chill. 

It turns out that a 300-piece puzzle is just about perfect for chilling around a big table on a Friday night, with margaritas and Cheez-Its and Zebra Cakes (because SNACKS!).

It took one to two adults and one to two kids about two-and-a-half hours to put together this puzzle--

--and it's just as adorable and interesting as I remembered!

Syd asked, "Where are all the princesses?", and that's one of the most interesting things, because in 1981, there weren't many princesses! 1981's Disney was still very much associated with anthropomorphized cartoon animals:

Alas, all the racist characters are present--see the crows from Dumbo? And the Br'er animals from Song of the South?

But you've also got some pretty deep cuts from the other Disney cartoons. When is the last time you've seen Clarabelle Cow?

Syd also noticed this one--why the snot is Tinkerbell's dress PINK?!?

Ugh I love it SO MUCH!!! I don't know what happened to the one that I had when I was six, but this one I am keeping forever, and I am FOR SURE going to put it together again while watching Disney movies when we buy a month of Disney+ later this summer (HAMILTON IS COMING TO DISNEY+!!!!!!!!!).

But only the movies that came out by 1981. And not the racist ones.

I'll let you know what color Tinkerbell's dress is!

P.S. If you, too, remember liking Disney circa 1981, this 1981 Disney newspaper is hella cool. I *might* have gone to Disney World the first time around then (although the only thing that I remember about that trip is the Main Street Electrical Parade, particularly Pete's Dragon scaring the shit out of me), so it's interesting to see what was going on!

Logic Games and Puzzles That Teens Genuinely Like

Logic is something that I have been griping about since the beginning of our homeschool. I kept feeling, for years, like I wanted something "systematic," A baby debate club, perhaps, or a Socratic reasoning curriculum. Something!

I don't know why I felt this way, because otherwise, most of our homeschool years have been very much anti-packaged curricula. Following someone else's instructions or sequential study very rarely fit in with what, and how, my kids wanted to learn. So I just keep feeling like maybe I did want a formal sequence but also didn't want anyone else prescribing it for us but also didn't want to do it myself.

Instead, I regularly offered the kids logic games and puzzles.

And that's what I still do, now that they're teenagers, and honestly, it works great! It turns out that the kids practice plenty of logical reasoning with the essays they write and the presentations they create and the discussions that we have. If they ever want to engage in the systematic study of the form of arguments, they're well set up to do that. What I'm mostly interested in doing with them is the kind of logical reasoning that doesn't necessarily build up your formal knowledge of the form of arguments, but your deductive, critical thinking, analytical, and pattern-making skills.

And that's exactly the kinds of skills that you improve when you regularly play logic games and work logic puzzles!

Even better is that lots of logic games and puzzles are super cheap or free. Most of ours come from thrift stores, yard sales, and our local libraries.

Even EVEN better is that they can take as little or as much time as you need. The kids and I can while away a full hour on a school day, or just a few minutes.

Even even EVEN better is that they're really fun! We do logic games and puzzles every week, but the kids don't always notice that they're part of school, because sometimes we do them in the evenings or on the weekends as part of our family time.

Here, then, are our favorite logic games and puzzles. We don't cycle through them with any sort of system--rather, often we'll get super invested in one particular type of puzzle or game and do it a LOT, then move onto something else, or I'll pull out something that the kids haven't worked with in a long time and they'll fall in love with it all over again, etc. The list below, though, are the ones that we return to most often:

New York Times crossword

Matt and I work the New York Times crossword daily in our newspaper, saving them to work later if we don't have time to do them that day. This year, we started setting aside the Monday crossword for the kids, which means that on some evenings, we can all sit at the kitchen table, wine in a couple of glasses, and trade the crossword around. 

Matt and I switch off when one of us is stuck, and when a kid gets stuck, she'll hand her crossword to one of us and we'll solve a few before handing it back to her for another go.

For larger sets, I bought Matt a couple of the New York Times crossword omnibuses--particularly Thursday, which is always the "tricky" puzzle!

The puzzles increase in difficulty throughout the week, so you can buy an omnibus of just the Monday puzzles and have a whole set that's perfect for a young teenager:

every single ThinkFun game

Every single time I see a ThinkFun game at a thrift store or yard sale, I buy it, and I have never been disappointed. The kids' favorite ThinkFun game, by FAR is this one:

We don't own it, but every couple of years I check it out of the library, the younger kid zones into it until she solves every single puzzle, and I return it and check it out a couple of years later when it's brand-new again. As a matter of fact, guess what's waiting for Matt to pick up from our local university's library right this minute (along with two different botany ID kits, a portable weather station for an APES microclimate project, and a human body model that I want to check out as a possible resource for our biology study)?

One thing that I DON'T like about these games is that they're all plastic, and lots of it. I like to think that we somewhat mitigate that by buying them secondhand, and keeping them in good condition so that we can pass them on again someday.

Here are the ThinkFun games that the kids have played and that I know they love!



And here are the ones that are still on my wishlist to try out someday!

Sudoku

The younger kid and I are the ones who super love Sudoku, but the older kid is pretty game to try one out if I put it in front of her. Sudoku also comes in our newspaper every day, and the younger kid can handle the Monday and Tuesday games pretty handily. I've also got a gameboard version of Sudoku that I don't adore and won't live through our next purge, but it's a different setup and so feels novel to the kids whenever we pull it out:

I don't own this Colorku game, but it's been on my Amazon wishlist for the kids for practically their whole lives, lol, and if I can ever find THAT at a thrift store or yard sale, I'd replace our current Suduko game board with it in a hot minute. I like that is more lovely, has a much smaller profile, and divorces the reasoning skill from the number system:

manipulatives

The kids have grown out of their childhood love of pattern blocks, but our love of tangrams is nine years strong by now! Miraculously, we STILL have all of the pieces of that tangram-a-day calendar, and it still gets played with.

Our love of pentominoes is more recent, but they remain a favorite, as well.

Similar to these is one of the younger kid's favorite games: 

I bought it for her for Christmas a couple of years ago, and she loves it so much that I've been on the lookout for other Brainwright games, but nothing has come on the secondhand market for me to try, alas.

games

I don't think we're social enough, because as a family, we don't really enjoy a lot of whole-family games. The kids went through the odd obsession with a particular game as they grew, most notably that year that I think we played Sorry! several times a day, every single day, but now whenever I suggest a game, if I don't agree to Cards against Humanity both kids lose interest and instead just humor me... with a varying amount of good humor. 

But occasionally, if I ask just one of them, I can get them to play happily with just me. I managed to get the younger kid as into Blokus as I am for quite a while, and that was AWESOME. We prefer this two-person travel game setup, and at one point I actually managed to find a second set of pieces being sold in a bag in a thrift store, so now we have enough pieces to have pentominoes, too! The younger kid and I also like to play SET together, although frankly, she prefers to play the online version by herself, humph!

The older kid has been my chess buddy for nigh upon a decade by now, and she'll also happily play Scrabble with me whenever I want. But honestly, we'd all prefer to play solitaire games or puzzles while in the same room, chatting occasionally and listening to music. Shrug!

puzzle books from The Critical Thinking Company

When I was a kid in pull-out gifted classes in my local public school system, Mind Benders were my FAVORITE thing. I devoured them, and if I'd known that they came in real puzzle books that you could buy, and not just in mimeographed hand-outs given to me by my teacher whenever I looked especially bored, I would have been asking for them for every Christmas and birthday. 

Neither of the kids love Mind Benders quite as much as I still do, but they still like to work them occasionally. What the kids really like, though, is for me to lay out a whole assortment of puzzle books from The Critical Thinking Company, including my favorite Mind Benders, so they can choose whatever style of logic puzzle they feel like working right that second. I get out a whole pile of puzzle books and put on some music, and it's a lovely way to spend an afternoon!

Here are our favorites, although don't necessarily use these specific levels as your guide:



To me, the variety is the best part; I like to see what types of puzzles each kid is drawn to, and it might lead me to sneakily assign more of that, or specifically something else, at a later date.

Especially now that the kids are getting so grown up and ever more ready to go off on their own, I think that doing puzzles and logic games is a nice habit to enforce, completely apart from the goal of advancing their logical reasoning and deduction skills. Brain games like these will keep their brains strong as they grow old, you know, when I'm not around to remind them to eat blueberries and wear helmets when they ski and memorize poetry.

Hopefully, Matt and I will keep remembering to do all that stuff as WE grow old, too!

Hands-On Fibonacci Sequence Explorations: Combining Logic, Math, and Art

I've realized that much of the hands-on math enrichment that I offer the kids is "number sense"--helping to develop their intrinsic understanding of numbers, their flexibility with them, their pattern recognition of number relationships. Whether it's fractions or geometry or exponents that we're studying, I always see space in their curriculum where free exploration can make kids wiser in what they're studying.

In algebra right now, the older kid is studying proportions and ratios, so what better time to spend some more time on the Golden Ratio?

I introduced the kids to the basic concept of the Fibonacci Sequence and how it's calculated, then asked them to use each number in the sequence as one side of a square. They were to draw those squares on 1cm graph paper, color them in, and cut them out. I told them that they should stop only when the next square would not fit onto a single piece of graph paper, although if we did this project again, I'd tape together larger sheets of graph paper ahead of time so that they could extend the sequence further.

Here's one of the sets that the kids came up with:

Apologies for the poor lighting in these photos, but school gets done on rainy days as well as sunny!

You can make lots of pretty patterns with just these squares. And yes, I DO think that Fibonacci Sequence stacking blocks would be AWESOME!

Next, I told the kids that these squares of the Fibonacci Sequence are also a puzzle, and I challenged them to use all of their squares to make a rectangle. They're familiar with this idea from the pentominoes that we've played with.

Here is the older kid's rectangle:

And here is the younger kid's!

The kids did not confer, so I think it's interesting that both built their rectangles the same way, and neither happened upon the "spiral." In fact, when I later rearranged the pieces to show the spiral, the younger kid still didn't really see it. This is where more and larger squares would have helped by extending the pattern.

I took away the larger squares, and had the kids solve the puzzle to make a rectangle with only the three smallest:

Then I added the next piece, and again asked them to solve the puzzle:

Do this again and again, and you see how the pattern can be formed:

Beautiful, isn't it?

In related news, we were at the US Space and Rocket Center last week for the older kid's Space Camp graduation (more on that another time!!!), and in their museum, look at the display that we found!

It was particularly terrific because it extended the pattern for us to see!

 I didn't look at any additional resources with the kids until after they'd worked the "puzzle," because I didn't want them to see a solution, but later in the day we watched these two YouTube videos from two of my favorite YouTube channels:

Here are some other great Fibonacci resources that we've been exploring:

• Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci
• Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature
• The Rabbit Problem

And here are some more ways to explore the Fibonacci Sequence in logic, math, and art:

• Fibonacci circle art. This project is to circles what my project is to squares. 
• Here's how to draw the spiral from the squares.
• Here's how to see the spiral in nature. We struggled with this for a while, and Syd is still somewhat of a nonbeliever. 

This project gave inspired me to come up with some more extension ideas just for me. I think it would be really cool to design a large-format squares of the Fibonacci Sequence, print it, and glue it to foam board the way that Matt and I did with the decanomial square. Imagine how many more interesting patterns you could come up with. I also deeply need to sew a Fibonacci sequence quilt.

As if I don't already have enough dream projects on my to-do list!