Rolling the Dice

Anyone who has a five year old (or is a Kindergarten teacher) knows exactly what I’m talking about here.

Five year olds are in a weird place emotionally, physically and intellectually. They’re learning new things at a phenomal rate (reading, math, music), they’re able to do new things every day (brush teeth, make sandwiches, hop on one foot) and gaining social skills at a dizzying rate (so far two girls in my son’s class have declared that they want to marry him).

I think that this is why kids can seem to have a split personality at this age. They’re facing an internal conflict about wanting to be a big kid, but they don’t want to leave babyhood behind completely, because, let’s face it, growing up is scary.

Basically, aside from puberty, being five is one of the roughest years of a kid’s life.

So playing a board game with a five year old can be - interesting.

Some days, they’ll be able to handle an hour-long game of something complicated, like Carcasonne. On other days, it can be a struggle to get them to focus on Go Fish for five miuntes.

Example: Our family got Sequence for Christmas. It’s rated for 7 and up, but our five year old can do grade 2 math and has been reading for nearly two years, so I didn’t figure it would be out of reach for him.

At the start of the game, he was engrossed, thinking up strategy, etc. Ten minutes later, he was picking cards at random, and didn’t even noticed when the game was over.

As long as you’re willing to accept that this game-playing behaviour is going to be the norm for a year or so, playing games with a five year old is still possible.

I should know - I’ve got two of them at my house this afternoon for a board game playdate.

The kids have had an extra-long holiday - they’re just back at school today - so last Monday, I came up with a great project to keep us from screaming at each other - tidying up the games shelves.

At our house, we have two five-shelf bookcases in which we store our collection. It was a complete disaster, with pieces missing or stuffed in odd places.

We took it shelf by shelf, going through each game and finding out what was missing, the kids helping out along the way.

We wrote down what was missing from each game on sticky notes, and the kids put together the puzzles to make sure all the pieces were there.

Then we went through what we call the “missing pieces” bag, which is a large ziploc bag with pieces, cards, dice, etc., that we’ve found around the house, and tried to put things back in the right boxes.

It took us two three-hour sessions, but we managed to get the kids’ games and puzzles done.

The benefit is that now they have easy access to all of them, and it’s so much more appealing to actually play a game when you know that all of the pieces are there.

We still have a big mess on the other side of the room in the grown-up games shelves, but I feel confident we’ll soon see improvement there, too.

I encourage anyone reading this to go through their own collection of games - there’s nothing like tidying up to make you remember how fun it is to actually play those games you haven’t touched in a while.