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.

Taking a page from fellow blogger wegank (read his blog here), I asked my sons for their recommendations for games.

I started with my five-year-old, a sometimes silly, sometimes serious little guy who prefers music and art to dirt and trucks.

Here are his three favourite games:

Guess Who

This is honestly one of my favourite games, too. The only disadvantge it has is that you can only play with two people - no more and no less.

He says his favourite part of the game is “asking questions and finding out what it is”, by which I think he means he likes the logic aspect. He likes being able to systematically eliminate possibilities and come up with an answer.

I like that about the game, too. I also like that you can play it with a five year old, but you an play it with older kids, too, by picking up two (or more) cards each game.

I personally love playing with three cards each.

Guess Who is an inexpensive game (around here you can find it for about $15), and there are some variants that look interesting - Littlest Pet Shop is the first one that comes to mind.

Also, the more recent versions have added in faces with different colours, which I think is awesome.

13 Dead End Drive

We picked this game up at the local Salvation Army Thrift Store for $1.99. Even with a few minor missing pieces, we found it a good value.

Our five-year loves this one for “the cards and the traps”. The traps are probably the best part of this game, which usually involves me getting frustrated with the set-up process.

A new version of the game may be less frustrating, but 13 Dead End Drive does require about 5-10 minutes of assembly each time you play it. Which is why we don’t play it as often as our kids would like.

Monopoly Jr.

This game is meant as a way into the Monopoly games for younger kids. However, I find it still takes about an hour to play, so if your kids don’t have the patience for it, you might want to set a timer and declare a winner when it goes off.

“Moving around in a circle” is our son’s favourite of this game. I think he likes the repetition, but also the fact that it’s a lot like adult games, so it feels more grown up playing it.

Monopoly of any kind is a great way to learn about taking turns and counting money, so it makes sense to start trying to play it at age 5.

Next up: our seven-year-old’s recommendations (expect a reference to Pokemon!)

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!

Hello all you game-lovers out there.

Not “gamers” - I’m not into video games. No, this blog is all about the kinds of games you can play in a tent in the middle of the woods, in the living room in front of the fireplace during a snowstorm, or even outside with a bunch of energetic kids.

It’s about the fun, laughs, learning you can teach and share with kids of all ages through board games, co-operative play and other games that don’t require a computer chip.

I’ll be tackling ideas for games you can play with little ones that can’t yet read, right up to games you can play when the in-laws are in town.

I’ll give suggestions for good games to play at your next youth group, Beavers, Brownies or 4-H meeting, or at the family reunion when it’s too late for lunch and too soon for supper. 

I’ll review some of the zillions of games I currently have my shelves, and will gladly take requests and suggestions - I’m always up for a game.

Up first (tomorrow’s post) games to play with non-readers….