Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
How teaching children can be fun and games
FAMILY rituals enrich family life and support child development. Once you find an activity the whole family enjoys, the key is to repeat and make it a family habit – “family branding”. These activities do not have to be expensive, time consuming or complicated.
Making memories together fosters a sense of inclusion, structure and belonging – the hallmark of healthy family life. Memories can be revisited with fondness, evoking these moments of shared experiences that, over time, become part of a family’s unique DNA.
Amid the challenges of parenting and growing up, it’s crucial for parents to understand the high-impact benefits of positive, regular habits of family time. Here’s what parenting success could sound like: “I loved our family time. When we were kids, every Friday was pizza and games night.”
Set the stage with a meal
Think of making a simple meal together. For example, your routine could become a pizza night followed by games and puzzles.
Young children could knead the dough, help with spreading the sauce and slicing, dicing, chopping, shredding and arranging the toppings.
Language and cognitive skill building can be incorporated into these easy daily activities, making them fun, natural and interactive. Research identifies meal time talk as central to reinforcing relationships and developing vocabulary among young children.
Choose your game
Games and puzzles have the potential to promote a range of social and physical skills, concepts, strategy use and language development that will serve your child very well in math and literacy. Size, shape, space, patterns and sequences underlie alphabet recognition, spelling and numeracy. The key is to get little fingers to “learn the world”, developing their fine motor skills and making connections to language.
Some game suggestions:
Lego is great for developing concepts of whole-part relationships, how things fit and for promoting fine motor skills.
Jenga is a game of physical skill involving 54 blocks arranged in a tower. One block is removed by each player in turn, and replaced at the top of the tower, until it comes crashing down.
Scrabble reinforces letter recognition and spelling patterns. With younger children, it’s recommended to play as adult-child teams to provide a great learning opportunity. Handling the tiles, arranging and moving them about and placing them on the board are good exercises for fine motor development.
Card games of all kinds, including card tricks, afford endless possibilities for adult-child interaction and fun across age groups. Concepts of “more than” and “less than”, discussions of chance or probabilities as well as sequence and groupings, are given a good work out.
While you play
Parent-child talk makes a difference to a child’s language and social development. Significantly, parents should be mindful of how much they talk with their children, not simply to them. What matters is taking turns in conversation.
For example, if the family is working on a puzzle the child can group all the pieces by colour. Playing games allows parents to fully hear and respond to their child’s comments, which is central to building children’s vocabularies and understandings. – The Conversation.