Play Games With Your Kids

Yes, that’s an imperative.

Recently I was playing a game with a group of children ages five and six.

The kids were having a great time, that is except for one little girl.  She seemed really unsure of herself.  I helped her though the game, but watching/helping her made me think about how much we teach our children when we play games with them!  There are also a lot of great games out there for kids.  Here’s a nice little list for you!

• Turn taking – playing games where children have to take turns prepares kids to wait while someone else gets a turn and to pay attention and be ready to take their turn
• follow the rules – learning to follow the rules is a pretty big deal in life, and it starts with the little things like following directions to play a game; everyone has more fun, if everyone follows the rules!
• play fair – no one likes to be the one who looses because someone else cheated
• playing games with dominoes teaches children number matching (and color matching, if you have a colored set), counting, one to one correspondence (one dot = 1, etc.), more and less
• Playing games with a deck of cards (my brother in law calls them “bad man’s cards”) teaches kids number order, visual discrimination, and the names of those little characters on the corners (I was in college before I could tell which was a spade and which was a club – save your kid that embarrassment, please!).
• Our family loves A to Z junior.  Each player or team gets a game board with the alphabet.  Teams have to list items in categories that start with all the letters of the alphabet.  Who ever fills up their gameboard first wins.  Two of my children mastered their letter sounds by playing that game.  One of them learned to visually identify her letters by playing A to Z.
• Memory is a great game, not just for their memory but for so many other reasons.  When we brought Gus and Dimples home, they could not speak any English, but she could play memory.  We played it almost every day for a while.  We have a version with animals, another with everyday objects, and another with super-heroes.  The words for the things on those memory games were some of her first English words, well, that and the word, “match.”  We also have a game that matches animals and their babies; we talk about what animal babies are called sometimes when we play this version, the current favorite.  Silly little side note:  it wasn’t long after Gus was home that she could totally beat me at this game!  Though her mastery of the English language was still a long way off, this was something that she succeeded at.  She loved playing it for that reason; and I loved playing with her, because it was one of the few kid games that was a real challenge for me!  So much fun!
• Car alphabet games – As you drive around town, pick one letter and see how many times you and your children can spot that letter.  Alternatively, start at the beginning of the alphabet and work your way through the alphabet; this version is better played on longer road trips.
• State License plate games – copy a simple map of the US, give it to your child with a box of markers or colored pencils.  Each time you see a car from a different state, color that state on the map!  We’re doing this activity this summer!  I can’t wait to see how many the kids notice!  I might even give a treat to the child who gets all the states first – should be interesting – and might take years!
• I Spy With My Little Eye – We have played this game so much that I hate it, but that’s okay.  My kids have played it so much (and there’s four of them) that they don’t need me to play it anymore!  WooHoo!  Try to get tricky and use more difficult clues – instead of saying “I spy . . . something brown,” say, “I spy something that chews it’s cud,” for a cow.
• Shut the Box – simple concept, great math skills, fun game
• Scavenger Hunts – you can make them as easy as, “Go find ten different things that would fit in my pocket,” or “Go find two things you are really thankful for.”  Or you can get a little creative and give them instructions that require specialized knowledge:  “Find three things that are the primary colors and three things that are the secondary colors.”  Or, if you have a little time to plan ahead, you can hide clues throughout the house/yard that lead the kids from one place to the next.

I think sometimes we think that our kids need “learning toys” to learn, but really they learn so much more by interacting with other humans than they do that toy that sings the alphabet song!

So play games with your kids this weekend!

Oh, and tell me what your favorite game to play with your kids is – that’s an imperitive too!