Educational "Go Fish" for Science and History

How can a 5-year-old learn to identify Chopin, Magellan, Pasteur, Watt, and 48 other notable people in Science and History?

By playing the simple game of Go Fish.

But let me start at the beginning.

Over 10 years ago my husband and I purchased a deck of Composer playing cards from a music store in Anchorage, Alaska. We didn't really use them, but we kept them around, taking them with us when we moved to South Carolina and subsequently Texas, where we live now.

Sometime last year, my 4-year-old and I were sitting down to a game of Go Fish, using a deck of cards with cartoon fish on them. We wanted to make the game a little more challenging (and fun) so instead of simply asking for the number of the card, we started asking for the type of "fish" on the card (shark, whale, tuna, etc.).

Sometime during our game of Go Fish, that long-forgotten deck of Composer cards came to mind. I decided to locate them and see if we could play Go Fish with them.

The Composer deck is comprised of 13 different composers, each of which appears 4 times in the deck (on the same number of each suit). I proceeded to teach Joely the names of the composers by showing her the pictures on the cards. I taught her about six of the cards, and then we played a Go Fish game with them (although we changed the name to "Go Compose" when we played with the Composer cards).

After she had a pretty good "Handel" on those six composers, I taught her a couple more and we played again. It didn't take long before she could say the name of all 13 composers! And "Go Compose" quickly became one of Joely's favorite games to play.

Some time later I discovered that the makers of these cards, U.S. Game Systems, had several other decks available. So, for Joely's birthday last August, we purchased a few more card decks: Explorers, Scientists, Inventors, Authors, and Presidents. She has since (painlessly) learned 13 explorers, 13 scientists, and 13 inventors, and she now has a choice of 4 different Go Fish-type games to play: "Go Compose," "Go Explore," "Go Hypothesize," and "Go Invent." And we play frequently.

What I really like about the decks is that Joely now has the name and face of each of these people in her long term memory. When she hears new information about someone whose name she is already familiar with, she's able to remember that information much better since she has something in her memory to relate the new info to. By overhearing snippets of facts her older siblings learn about, Joely's gradually learning to associate the name of the person with their accomplishment (such as Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, Marco Polo and China, etc.).

Now that's what I call un-schooling!

Here's what the cards look like, and who's included in each of these decks.

Composers: "Go Compose"

1. Bach
2. Handel
3. Haydn
4. Mozart
5. Beethoven
6. Schubert
7. Mendelssohn
8. Chopin
9. Schumman
10. Liszt
11. Brahms
12. Tchaikovsky
13. Grieg

Explorers: "Go Explore"

1. Alexander the Great
2. Samuel de Champlain
3. Christopher Columbus
4. James Cook
5. Sir Francis Drake
6. Lewis & Clark
7. Vasco da Gama
8. Ferdinand Magellan
9. Leif Ericson
10. Sieur de la Salle
11. Robert Peary
12. Marco Polo
13. Stanley & Livingstone

Scientists: "Go Hypothesis"

1. Aristotle
2. Copernicus
3. Marie Curie
4. John Dalton
5. Charles Darwin
6. Albert Einstein
7. Enrico Fermi
8. Galileo
9. Johannes Kelper
10. Leonardo da Vinci
11. Gregor Mendel
12. Sir Isaac Newton
13. Louis Pasteur

Inventors: "Go Invent"

1. Archimedes
2. Alexander Graham Bell
3. Thomas Alva Edison
4. Michael Faraday
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Johannes Gutenburg
7. Cyrus H. McCormick
8. Guglielmo Marconi
9. Samuel F.B. Morse
10. George Stephenson
11. James Watt
12. Eli Whitney
13. The Wright Brothers