To try to get our daughter “focused” in game playing we have purchased a handful of HABA games. The only one of the HABA’s we have opened so far is Here, Fishy, Fishy! Because we would like her to try to “master” the game. Last week while playing our weekly game with my sister she went to her shelf and pulled out the game and sat down next to us, dumped out the contents and played by herself for a little while.
That evening she pulled out another game, more advanced, and wanted to play with that one. The look of betrayal she gave us when we told her that she is not ready for it. She cried and cried because we told her “no.” We then offered to play a matching game with her and that did not work.
Another game that she enjoys from time to time is the Let’s Go Fishing game in which the pond moves around in a circle and you have to try to catch a fish with a plastic rod when the fish closes its mouth. If I tell her what color of fish to catch, she would sit there using her pole and catch one or two of the chosen color and laugh and have fun with the whole process.
If some of this sounds familiar, Entry 14, talked about some of this too.
NOW WHAT
The next question is now what are we doing to keep her progressing in the game world? The answer to that so far has been pretty simple. We get her to sit and play a few games with us.
Camp is a game that you choose a creature as your pawn, roll dice and move along a track, and read questions if you land on certain spaces. The last time we played, our daughter picked everyone’s character, rolled the dice, and moved everyone to the spots we told her to go to. She is not at the point where she can answer the questions, in due time that will happen. Doing things step by step is the way to go.
Another game in which our daughter recently helped with is Queen Games Lupos which is about a wolf pack. To move the wolves you draw tokens from a bag. Guess who helped by drawing the tokens and even moved some of the pieces. Yup, my sweet baby girl did until she lost interest and wanted to play with her building blocks.
As my family continues to play the hundreds of games that we own, finding more to introduce to her is becoming easier. With knowing what holds her interest for more than five minutes also helps us to find the “Junior” or “My First” editions of games that as she continues to grow, learn, and develop, she would want to play with us and friends.
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
My philosophy is that nobody is too young to learn how to play games. Because each child develops at different rates, playing games is one way to help them learn and reach certain milestones.
I found a set of charts that highlights what professionals have deemed as “normal” milestones in child development. This particular chart (see below) covers the 3-5 year old range and upon review, my child, even though she is behind the norm for language skills, at just shy of two and half has exhibited many of the items in the 4 and 5 year old range.
I truly believe that because she does understand complex sentences and ideas (her level of comprehension is off the charts), the moment she decides to start speaking more of the words she understands, she will be wanting to participate in more and more of our gaming sessions.
Maybe for a future article I can write about “adult” development in board gaming. I need to see if there has been any research on it. If not, maybe getting back into a scientific research mode would help me feel more “academically whole” again.
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