Board games – boredom beaters

Why not set aside some family time each week to play a traditional board game together?

It may be a bit old-fashioned, and few parents these days have time to play games with the children after work, but you may be surprised by how much a family can gain by setting aside one evening a week as a games night.

Games are a great way of bonding, as well as a vehicle for teaching children good social skills. It is also a useful way to reinforce a variety of educational skills.
Children who ordinarily find it difficult to concentrate at the best of times are often absolutely enthralled by even the dustiest old sets of Snakes and Ladders.

Which games?
Your choice may have a lot to do with your own memories of playing games as a child, but do remember to choose games that reflect the age and stage of your children.

To keep more advanced children interested, choose games that are above the level of the youngest player. One way around having a big age gap between players is to allocate duties to each player to help keep the littlest one from getting frustrated. This can also help to create a sense of responsibility and facilitate team work. The oldest players might do the reading or calculating. The youngest child might roll the dice or move the counters.

Some games take longer to complete than others, so it is wise to have a strategy for bringing a game to a close if it starts to drag on for too long.

Rules:

?    Turn taking – have a specific order for each player so that no one can dominate. Change this order for each game so that everyone has a chance to start first.

?    Gracious winning – you could even play down the importance of winning by playing the game until everyone finishes.

?    Agree to the rules of the game before starting, and refer back to them if there is conflict.

Game skills:

Here are some games you might want to try

?    Counting games, where counting forwards and backwards is the main activity, such as Snakes and Ladders, Ludo, Sorry and Trouble. These provide practice and reinforcement of addition and subtraction skills. They also encourage social skills such as turn taking.

?    Bingo games are also great fun. They are games of chance rather than skill, but you can still teach many skills through Bingo. You can download Bingo games from educational websites to practise rhyming words and letter identification.

?    Memory games and snap games are great for just that; memory. It is also excellent for helping children work together to find the illusive card to make the pair.

?    Pick -up sticks is great for sensory development; hand and eye coordination. It also develops another great skill: patience.

?    Chess and Draughts enable children to think strategically; to predict how others might choose to move and their own response to that.

?    Scrabble – Junior Scrabble is a good starting point. Scrabble introduces children to conventions of spelling and to new words.

Keep it together
Here are some tips for keeping all the games in one piece

•    Make it the children’s responsibility to put all the pieces away when the game is finished.

•     Create a special place for all the games to be put away together in a games cupboard or games shelf.

•    Reinforce that games (and all their pieces) should be left undisturbed until the next games night.

By Anna Corballis Fry