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.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS