How to Teach Your Child Lessons Through Games

Games can be a very valuable tool to help shape your child into a thoughtful, smart, and responsible adult. There are several games that I think really helped my child learn and retain important life lessons.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Monopoly
• Scrabble
• Mad Libs
• Scattergories

1. 

   Mad Libs. They consist of stories containing blank spaces where certain words are left out for the other player to fill in. The player who chooses to be the reader picks the story and does not disclose to anyone what the story is about. The reader will ask the writer to give words. These words, categorized by types(for ex. verb, noun, etc), will fill in the blanks. The end result is a humorous, off the wall story. This is an excellent school age game to help your child learn proper grammar and spelling. This game teaches creativity, logic and good clean humor. It's hard for some children to remember the difference between a verb and an adverb. Mad Libs will help the child make clear distinctions and have fun doing it. There are all different types of Mad Libs available. There are movie mad libs, travel, holiday, and other themes.

2. 

   Scrabble. Scrabble gives the child the gift of seeing outside the box, problem solving. Scrabble will encourage your child to want to increase their vocabulary. Although, the best source for advanced learning is reading. With scrabble, you are given 7 tiles per player with a letter on each one. Each letter is worth a certain amount of points. You pick your own tiles so there is no telling what letters you may pick. As you use the letters on words during your turn, you replace them as you use them from tiles that are faced down. The purpose of the game is to use all of your tiles to make words, while racking up points for using uncommonly used letters worth more points. Sometimes it stretches the imagination and recalls on your child's ability to remember words they have read or heard.

3. 

   Monopoly. Monopoly is generally for the older child. It gives the parent a great opportunity to teach budgeting and the value of money.

4. 

   Scattergories. This is one of my family's favorite games. This is a word game with an objective of naming the object in the category with the given initial. Brainstorming is learned from this process.

Tips & Warnings

• Include a family game night once a week in your hectic schedule. This can take your child to a whole new level of learning.

Resources

• WesleyJ's How to Score in Scrabble article
• WesleyJ's How To Play Scrabble article

[StarrySkye]

on 11/4/2008 These are great tips. It's always so much more fun to learn with games. Thanks for these ideas!

[02SmithA]

on 10/29/2008 I love Scattergories! Great game to get the mind moving!

[Creativehearts1]

on 10/29/2008 Good suggestion - when kids are having fun, they don't even know that they're learning!

[WesleyJ]

on 10/28/2008 Great article. I am a definite believer, because games allow them to WANT to understand. You'll be teaching them and they won't even know it. Absolutely 5 stars!

[amylaine]

on 10/27/2008 Great tips, learning through games is very important for kids.