This Mom Made A Periodic Table Battleship Game For Her Kids And It’s Brilliant

Homeschool mom Karyn Tripp is beyond cool. When her kids were trying to memorize the Periodic Table she turned it into an awesome Battle Ship game. Check it out!

Chemistry is hard. As a middle-schooler, I remember one of the darned hardest things about it was memorizing (and spelling!) those important elements on the periodic table, along with their symbols and atomic weights. While I’m definitely glad to have those days behind me, if I had to do it all over again, I’d love to be a kid in Karyn Tripp’s homeschool family. This mother of four came up with the brilliant notion to turn the periodic table into a Battleship game to help her young chemists learn the names and symbols found there.

“I came up with the idea because we play Battleship a lot at our house,” Tripp told The Huffington Post.

On her website, Teach Beside Me, Tripp share that the game is actually pretty simple to rig up. It just requires access to a computer with a printer, some paper clips and a couple file folders.

To start building your own Periodic Table Battleship game you first need to print four copies of the periodic table. A periodic table already has numbers running across the top of the elements so you just need to label down the vertical sides with the letters A, B, C and so on.

Once the sheets are labeled, grab your file folder, open it up and paper clip one to each inside flap to create your board. Players then draw their ships on the elements where they want them placed and the game begins! Tripp suggests laminating the sheets and using dry erase markers so you aren’t continually printing new sheets.

The game is a really cool way parents can make learning fun for kids, and likely her brood will remember those elements for a lot longer than I did because they’ll associate them with good times and fun.

Tripp regularly posts new ideas she’s come up with for making learning fun with her family at her educational blog, Teach Beside Me. Be sure to check it out to get her periodic table printables, posters and other educational resources.