Wisdom Wednesday: Educational Board Games – More Than a Game
Wisdom Wednesday: Educational Board Games – More Than a Game
Watch this month’s Wisdom Wednesday as I talk about board games and how they can benefit your child and their learning without them even realising it.
Read the show notes
Educational Board Games: More than a Game
I love games.
Who doesn’t?
I love getting lost in the thrill of the chase.
Board games are the best.
Playing games is especially helpful for kinaesthetic and visual learners.
It helps learners connect the knowledge with their understanding.
Learning the alphabet
how to spell
how to take turns
learning map of the world and co-ordinated plains (essential for maths)
Helps in practising thinking
problem-solving
critical-thinking and strategy skills, which are critical to the understanding of learning and practising new skills.
I can guarantee they will help children learn in a fun and relaxing way. They won’t even realise that they are learning most of the time. This is a definite plus for them and us.
Learning through play is so powerful, and as a teacher and learning consultant for many years, I have helped 1000’s of students to enjoy their learning experiences. It is my job to find fun ways for students to learn.
I’m going to share with you my 3 favourite board games and a few ways I use these games to help students. These are great games to use for homeschoolers as well.
Games 1: Scrabble
This is an oldie, but a goodie.
Scrabble is a word game for 2-4 players. You can score points by placing the tiles on the board to make a word. Each tile has a letter on it with a number for its value also. The person with the highest score when all the letters are gone wins.
Other ways of using Scrabble to help your child to:
Practice their spelling
Learning frequent letter grouping, which is part of learning how to spell. It helps children know what letter combinations appear regularly in words.
Great for starter spellers to learn 2 and 3 letter words.
How to take turns
Looking at how words can begin and end with the same letter.
Number 2: Battleships
Battleships is a strategy, guessing game for two players, which dates from World War 1.
It was originally played using paper and pencil by the troops.
In this game, you have a board each. Each player has 2 grids. Each grid is 10 X 10. There are marked letters A-J on the left-hand side and numbers 1-10 across the top. On one grid, the player arranges ships and records the shots by the opponent. On the other grid, the player records their own shots. There are 5 ships that are positioned in this grid and white markers for a “miss” and red markers for a “hit”.
While playing the game, children become familiar with the following:
Helps in practicing thinking, problem-solving, critical-thinking and strategy skills which are critical to understanding mathematics.
For the younger players, it is a great game developing memory, logic and strategy,
For the more experienced players, for developing an understanding of complex probability ratios.
Develop co-ordinated plains, grids and ordered pairs
Columns
Rows
Points
Graphs
Algebra
Number 3: Dragonology
Learning about geography can be more than reciting the capitals or studying maps.
In this game, you travel the world by air, land and sea, gathering knowledge of nine different species of dragons, using ancient spells and dragon charms in their pursuit. The game includes a map game board and a detailed 3-dimensional sculpted dragon and dragonologist.
While playing this game, students can:
Learn about where different countries are on the map – get a student to move a dragon of choice to a country you name.
Explore different cultures – current and past, eg. Vikings
Explore Mythology
Learn about mythological animals
Use characters and dragons and countries to develop storytelling and writing of stories.
So there you have it some ways that I non-traditionally use board games to teach those subjects that students can find daunting and get stressed and anxious about.
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Zoe
