June 14 - Superhero Adventure

Another day with no school, another day where it would be so easy to just blow off morning activities... But I managed to motivate a little and get something going.  

It helps that the kids love Superhero Adventure. Normally I try to make Superhero adventure a game in which the kids have to work together to accomplish something, but today I just wanted to take it easy and play with the kids. They surprised me by saying they wanted to be villains this time, however...

Anatetar and Mr. L... Supervillains! 

I went and got stuff to be a hero from their room: 

Electro-Samurai... The hero! 

The kids being villains kind of threw me for a loop with the playing... Was I supposed to let them win to make it more satisfying for them or defeat them so that the good guys win? I wasn't sure. So I just chased them around the house with rubber swords. That seemed to work okay.  

SELFGRADE: B-.  The kids had fun, but it wasn't really teaching them any real lessons. But then again, kids play to learn and all, so maybe they were learning? Regardless, the kids got to play with me at their level and I got to feel like I wasn't wasting the morning. 

May 9 - Superhero Adventure

HYPOTHESIS: you can teach cooperative play through running certain scenarios with your kids. 

PROCEDURE: For Superhero adventure this month I was thinking we might have our homemade costumes ready, but the sewing still has to be done. So we just went forward with what we had, and Lyric wanted to be Robin while Zephyr made up the mysterious Mister Y. I wanted to tell Zephyr that Mister E might be a better way to hit that pun, but thought better of it... His using a Y at the end probably signifies some new level of reading understanding, why get in the way of that? 

I constructed 4 "gates" and placed them around my living room.  

Post it notes would've worked too, but tape and paper worked fine.  

The idea here was to give them various gates they'd have to cover as I called them out, and since they wouldn't be able to reach more than one on their own, I could make them work together. It would be kind of like a cooperative game of "ship to shore", where the kids would race to carry out an order but they had to work together. 

Lyric wanted to run a scenario with zombies on balloons, so I indulged him and said I was Brother Blood and I was calling in zombies from dimensional gateways. As I called out two numbers, the boys would indeed direct each other over to the right place. We'd pretend to fight off the zombies for a few seconds, then I would give them another countdaown to get to the right gate. I think 4 gates might have been too few, there were a few times I realized they could just stay at the number they were on rather than leave. Next time I'll try 8 gates. 

RESULTS: the kids did end up working together and seemed to have a great time doing it. I think the format is very promising as a Nuclear Submarine, I'm excited to try building on it.

Superhero Adventure is always popular with Lyric, it's kind of what he wishes he could be doing all the time. In giving him that, I gotta call this a success. 

April 15 - Superhero Adventure

HYPOTHESIS: By performing a task where they have to work together, children can be taught the value of cooperation.

PROCEDURE: Like last month's Superhero Adventure, I wanted to set up a task where the kids would have to bridge a gap together. This time, I figured it would be dimensional wormholes... that way I could narratively have monsters come out of the wormholes while giving the kids something they would have to plug up.

Zephyr claimed he was Pokéman, a superhero who used super-powered pokémon cards to fight bad guys, while Lyric wanted to be Rocket Boy. I think Lyric just wanted to stay in his pajamas, honestly, but I thought it was pretty neat how he made a story around them.

Whereas last time I ended up using a shoehorn to extend between the two kids, this time I had the idea of using a rainbow tube from this seldom-used play tent the kids had. This turned out to be a great prop. The kids loved using it.

I wasn't exactly sure how far apart to put the two wormholes, so I put them about 10 feet apart from one another. As it turns out, I WAS WAY OFF.

I tried to correct it by saying we had to go into the other dimension, and in there all sorts of geometry was weird. It was admittedly a weak and expositional section of storytelling, but whatever. I moved the two wormholes closer together so the kids could put the tube between both.

Teamwork!

RESULTS: The kids seem to be getting better at working together when they need to... and I heard a story about them hugging each other as they left school, making other parents and nannies envious that they seemed to be siblings that get along. I'm not sure you can draw a direct link from this to that, but it's all a rich tapestry and all. I think we're seeing some real results here!