Delight-Directed Learning and Video Games?

This week the Schoolhouse Review Crew is hopping with posts about Teaching Creatively. Today's topic is Delight-Directed Learning. I didn't officially sign up for the blog hop, but this weekend's events led me to this post.

Eli and Brynne have HUGE imaginations. A lot of times their playtime consists of reenactments of television shows or video games. They make paper puppets of characters, use other toys to play their characters and act out scenes, build scenes on Minecraft, use cardboard boxes to make rooms and houses and other scenes, etc. They have a Wii and Nintendo 3DS and love all of the Mario games. A new game is coming out called "Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon". Eli already has "Luigi's Mansion", the first game, so he knows what to expect and is so excited! It will be released at the end of this month. The Easter Bunny knows this! **wink**

This weekend Brynne and Eli spent the majority of their time ghost-hunting through our "mansion", which meant that we spent a lot of our time with the lights turned off, doors shut, and the drapes drawn because ghosts will only come out if it's dark. They had their flashlights, homemade ghost backpack with vacuum sucker, and their imaginations.

This led us to yet another conversation about how Eli wants to tour a mansion. He spent some time on the internet looking at photos of mansions in California (a state he REALLY wants to visit). There are a couple of mansions within 30-45 minutes of where we live. However, one of them that he would like to tour is actually just someone's home, so I don't think we'll be knocking on their door.

The other mansion, however, is now a Missouri State Park! It is called the Bothwell Lodge and sits atop a bluff outside Sedalia, Missouri. I had forgotten about it until we drove by it a couple of weeks ago while going to my niece's basketball game.

I told Eli about it and told him I would do a search on the www to see if they still do tours. And, they do! Not only do they do tours, but they also have Teacher's Guides available for learning about the mansion, it's history, the history of the time when it was built, and nature trails surrounding it. There is a pre-visit guide, tour guide (including scavenger hunts), and post-visit guide. And, not that I care, but they even include the Core Standards.

Really? How cool is that??

So, a video game leads to a fun day of imaginative play which leads to a desire to tour a mansion which leads to an upcoming field trip and unit study.

Now THAT'S delight-directed learning!