For children, play and learning should be served in equal parts. But there are always double points up for grabs when you get to combine these two into one supercharged activity. Board games provide all manner of education opportunities that will help your kids foster a love for learning from a young age. If you can hide broccoli under a mountain of cheese, why not disguise education under the clever ruse of a board game?! Here are the top 5 benefits of board games for kids other than pure unadulterated fun.
Improve Reading Skills
Board games for children are equipped with tons of learning opportunities to practice reading and writing. Games like Boggle or Scrabble use letter tiles and urge young readers to form new words. When kids are just getting introduced to reading, they can play beginner games like What’s Gnu or Pop for Sight Words. These games make kids familiar with different letters and give them a chance to piece them together like puzzles.
Promote Strategic Thinking
The value of boar games in early childhood development goes beyond tangible skills like reading and writing. It unlocks abstract development like strategic thinking that allows kids to become independent learners. From a game as basic as Connect Four to something more advanced like Catan, kids can learn to think two steps ahead and see how a well-thought-out plan can lead to success. These games also teach kids to think on their feet as the game can rapidly change and they need to improvise their strategy.
Develops Teamwork
Many games are competitive which is a valuable lesson on its own, but there are games out there that value teamwork and show kids how a task can only succeed when everyone has a hand in it. Feed the Woozle is a fun game for kindergarteners where everyone has to work together to feed the hungry monster before the snacks run out. Pandemic is a tad more complicated as all players must work together to stop a virus from spreading across the globe. Only by working together can these games be completed, and the collective victory always tastes much sweeter than an individual win.
Improves Numeracy Skills
There are tons of board games on the market that help kids in the numeracy department. Sum Swamp is a crafty game with basic addition and subtraction tasks for players as young as 5. The whole family can join in on a game like Ticket to Ride where basic math skills will mean the difference between winning and losing. Identifying patterns also helps kids with the linear thinking needed for mathematics and a colorful game like Qwirkle is perfect for this. Even some of the best card games around only need a simple deck of cards and can teach young ones to count, add, and subtract. Even a Snakes and Ladders board allows kids to count forwards and backward, a mundane task that is made 10 times more exciting when it is on a game board.
Promotes Creative Thinking
Traditional education often leaves little to the imagination, but board games engage children’s creative thinking letting them think out of the box. This is essential for problem-solving and helps kids become well-rounded learners. Dixit is a board game perfect for the whole family as it does not involve reading. Players simply look at their illustrated cards and try to connect them with a single word or phrase. Codenames uses a similar tactic and Codenames Junior uses images instead of words to make it accessible to younger kids. Apples to Apples uses this kind of out-of-the-box thinking too but players must vocalize their rationale, polishing off their communication skills.
Let’s Kids Focus
Board games that continue for more than a few minutes give kids the opportunity to focus and lengthen their attention span. The age-old saying time flies when you’re having fun rings very true when it comes to board games. Before they even realize it, kids would have completed a task or finished a game and will usually be begging for more. This also works wonders for anxious children as they are able to take their minds off their source of anxiety and focus on something more productive and constructive. There are plenty of classic games like Bingo or Monopoly that have been themed to suit a child’s favorite character or subject. Switching out the old dusty set for some new Spiderman games or a Frozen edition will help kids focus even more as they get to play with their favorite faces in front of them.
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