Battle of the Brains

Do you want to know what is boring? Tests. Do you want to know what is fun? Of course you do! Me, I'm fun. Just kidding, the real answer is playing games. 

We are about to start our Christmas break so I wanted to review everything we have learned so far, but there is no way I'm going to have my kids sit and take tests all day. What's a gal to do? I'll tell you what you do, you hold a Battle of the Brains competition!!

My kids have been looking forward to this for weeks. Silly kids, if they only knew my tricks. 

The battle consists of five different events; my five year old, who can't quite play yet, is the score keeper, chooser of the next event, and punisher if so needed. The five events we had were: art, spelling, math, fitness, and science. Some of these were just for fun, others were a review.

The first event she chose was art. The kids had to cover their eyes and try to draw a Christmas picture. The one who drew it most accurately won the event.

Our second event was the science game. I have taken a lot of the review questions from every science book we own and made a trivia game. We use an old Sorry board game. If you answer the question with no help, you get to roll two dice; if you are given a clue, you can only roll one die, and if you get the answer wrong you roll one die and have to move backwards. Doubles gives you an extra roll, but if you roll doubles three times you head back to start. 

The next event was fitness. We had a running clock and did death by burpees. Do you know what a burpee is? If you've never done one you're a lucky person, they are awful. Death by burpees is seeing how many you can do within the one minute time limit adding an additional burpee each minute. 

So on minute one, you do one burpee; minute two you do two burpees, and so on until you can't do anymore. Our victor got to 14. My awesome cell phone quality takes blurry pictures of movement, but it is probably for the best because all the big boys took their shirts off.

The fourth event was spelling, which really was just practice for the spelling bee, but once again because it was a game everyone more excited to "play". If they spelled one word wrong they were out.

The final event was math. They each had a puzzle of different multiplication facts; they had to start down the hallway and run to their spot, and if you knock someone over you had to sit in a penalty box for five seconds. The first one to complete the puzzle won the event.

The boys never put their shirts back on, sorry about that. 

Porter my 10 year old won four out of the five events!! The kids said that the winner should get a trophy; unfortunately, I didn't have one so I had to improvise.

What 10 year old boy wouldn't just LOVE a bouquet of fake flowers? The kids all that it was funny. 

We decided we will have a Battle of the Brains at the end of every semester, it was a lot of fun!!