Social Studies Explorers Themed Study Game

My best friend is a teacher, and every now and then she lets me help her come up with creative ways to help her students study in the form of games.   Currently, they are learning about explorers, which is a topic near and dear to my heart as I have always been in and loved geography and similar.

So what we came up with was using the battleship boards or printouts with ships to fit the high seas scenarios.  Basically, the questions would be either read aloud or put into a PowerPoint, whichever you prefer, and each team (two teams or however many boards you could get your hands on) would write down the answer to the question.

If the team gets it right, yay! If the team gets it wrong, that is a peg in one of their ships.  We also proposed that if a team got some number right (3-5) in a row, they could remove a peg from one of their ships. 

Whoever has the most intact fleet at the end of the game (or round, or whatever you want to break it down as) would win. 

There are all kinds of things that you could do with this, you could have little treats at the end for the winning team with those little gold chocolate coins, Hershey treasures (do they still make those?), or similar.

If you don't want to get the boards and keep track of all those little pieces, you could easily get some ship clip art, print out multiple ships on a page, and put boxes next to them that would get checked instead of pegs going in holes. 

I am really glad my best friend lets me in on things like this, because I always enjoyed the games that my teachers used in high school to help us study.  It really did make it all so much more enjoyable and quite frankly easier to remember than just a typical study guide. 

Happy crafting!