Rolling the Dice

My family loves board games. It’s not a coincidence. My husband and I have always loved them, and we made a point of bringing up our kids to have an appreciation for the whole experience.

Many of our friends who have children around the same age as ours have asked us how we taught our kids to sit and play games with us.

The key things, I think, are to start them young, and to be willing to adapt.

When our sons were infants, we often played board games with them in our arms. It was a great way to actually do something we liked while still interacting with our kids.

As they got to the toddler stage, it was an opportunity to teach them how to treat pieces with respect (read: keeping them from eating the dice or putting the scrabble tiles in our coffee), and also to model how to be a good sport.

I think our oldest son was not much older than 2 when he got his first game. A Fisher Price version of memory, I believe. It had solid cards that were easy for him to pick up and flip over, and they could be used in many ways.

It was around this age, too, that we started letting the kids play on a “team” with an adult. Their duties were usually limited to rolling dice, moving tokens around the board, and “holding” things for us that we would need for the game (money, the deed cards in Monopoly, etc.)

I really think that all of this fostered a sense of game-time as family time. We were spending time together, and enjoying it, and that’s never a bad thing to do as a family. Now they associate playing games with family time.

As kids hit the preschool years, playing games with them gets even easier. It reinforces lots of great lessons – turn taking, losing (and winning) graciously, as well as things like letters, numbers, and colours.

There are more and more games out there labeled 3 and up or 4 and up, but we always took these with a grain of salt. Before selecting a game to play with a preschooler, take into account how long it will take to play, whether the tasks are too hard or to easy, and most important for my kids – whether there are small pieces for them to play with and lose.

Since most pre-schoolers can’t read well enough to understand instructions, accept that you will be playing the game with them. It’s probably a good idea, anyway, because you may need to be the “judge” in any disputes.

Also consider shortening the game in some way, especially if it’s the first time playing it. Most really good games for kids this age only take 15 to 20 minutes to play, but there are some 4-year-olds who will insist on trying to play Monopoly Jr. Tell them ahead of time that you’re going to set a timer, and when it goes off, whoever is doing the best will win.

I’ll be doing reviews of great games for non-readers that I have on my shelves in the coming weeks (let me know if you have one you really want to hear about), but there are three games in particular that I would suggest immediately to anyone looking to play a game with a non-reader.

1. Candyland. This classic game has had a bit of an update in characters, and there are also several versions based on favourite TV characters (Dora the Explorer comes to mind). If your kids know their colours and can count to two, they can play this game.

1. Cranium’s Cariboo takes the learning a little further, with two levels of fun. The beginner level uses numbers to four, four basic colours, and the letters A, B and C. The advanced version uses all of the letters, four colours, and numbers to 10. One warning: the balls used in the games are very bouncy, and seem to be irresistible to little kids.

1. Also from Cranium (I love those guys and gals) is Hullabaloo. This is a great active game, especially when you have a houseful of kids on a rainy day. It uses sixteen different coloured and shaped foam pads with different pictures (and words) on them, and encourages them to move from pad to pad in silly ways. The voice that shouts instructions (from a special battery-operated speaker-thing) reminds kids that sharing space on the pads is not only allowed but encouraged.

Hopefully, this has given you a place to start enjoying playing games with your kids. Tomorrow, I’ll write about the next phase in kids games – the elementary school set!

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