Paying games with children during lockdown | Integrated Learning Therapy

Adapted from content in ‘Playing Smart’, by Susan Perry.

During this lockdown period, most parents will have spent some time playing games with their children. When two people of unequal ability (parent and child, older sibling and younger) play games requiring skill, the one who always loses feels frustrated. The better playing doesn’t have much fun either, since there’s no challenge when you expect to win all the time. And sometimes both winner and loser simply tire of the same old game.

To meet the needs of those who are playing the game, you might change the rules. Flexibility and creativity are the key words here. As long as all the players agree, anything goes (except making mistakes or losing on purpose, since children realise you’re doing it).

Here are some suggestions for the types of creative game-changing that will help to even the odds in some games.

Board games: When playing Monopoly, give the weaker (younger?) player more money when landing on GO. If one player goes bankrupt, keep playing anyway for a predetermined length of time.

When playing Scrabble or similar word games, look up words before placing them on the board. This will help to emphasise learning too.

If you like playing Checkers or Chess, play one game as a ‘test game.’ The winner counts how many checkers are left on the board, then starts the second game with that many fewer than the normal number. For example, if the winner ends up with five checkers on the board, next time he starts with only seven instead of the usual twelve. Continue this in subsequent games. For Chess, eliminate competition altogether by having both players talk over each move, looking for and agreeing on the best ones.

If you enjoy card games like poker, you can let your child exchange four or all five cards but limit yourself to one or two. Or let him exchange one card at a time, up to five, so he can build the best possible hand.

Solitaire is a fun card game to play as well. You can play a game together, alternating turns playing the cards. If the game ‘comes out,’ you’re both winners.

Outdoor games can also be tweaked to make them more fun for younger players. If you have a Frisbee, before play begins, players state which hand they will use for throwing and which for catching (or the same hand for both). You can play catch games with balls and other toys too. If the catcher can’t possibly reach the Frisbee at any time during its flight, the catcher gets a point. If she might have caught it, the thrower gets a point (the catcher is the one who decides). Two points are awarded to the thrower if the catcher touches the Frisbee but drops it. Two points also go to the thrower if the catcher uses the wrong hand or catches it against the body. Play to 11 or 21 points, switching sides when one player reaches 6 or 11 points.

← Previous Next →

Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.