Playing games with your children is a perfect way to spend some quality time together while at the same time consolidating learning skills, using social skills and having fun.

Allowing time for board games helps practice cognitive skills such as problem solving, speeds up our response time, helps develop logic and reasoning skills and can increase our spatial reasoning.

What do our children want more than anything? They want someone to play with, someone to listen to them and to have fun.

What do we as parents want? We want to develop our children’s verbal and communication skills, increase attention skills to encourage concentration and focus for longer periods of time and to activate our children’s imagination.

In addition playing games with our children allows us to spend quality time together, offers great learning opportunities, can satisfy competitive urges, offers opportunities to master new skills and gives endless possibilities for social skills to be practised.

Learning opportunities can cover number, shape, patterns, counting, letter and sight word recognition, reading with a purpose, strategy development, hand eye co-ordination and fine motor skills.

Communication skills such as engaging your children in conversation, sharing interests, turn taking, verbal communication, winning gracefully and a child’s attention span can all develop through participation and completion of games in a relaxed holiday atmosphere.

Maths

Snakes and Ladders – counting forwards and backwards / direction

Dominoes – number patterns

Cooking – measurement within the recipe; shopping list – (paying $ / c)

BLOKUS – a strategy game for all ages

JENGA – patterns / strategies / fine motor skills

Monopoly – counting, following directions, strategy

Reading / Spelling / Vocabulary

Read for fun

Start a novel together and take it in turns to read

Maps – follow your trip on a road map / world map; give directions for a trip; read the street signs

Recipes – reading, following directions

Scrabble – spelling, vocabulary

SNAP – sight words, spelling words

Boggle – spelling, vocabulary

Have their own shopping list to help in the supermarket.

Writing

Write the family Christmas cards

Keep a holiday diary

Research

Use your computer skills to find some interesting local activities.

Log on to the Museum or Art Gallery and find activities you would like to attend.

Keep a weather map for the holidays – create your own weather symbols.

Find the cheapest mode of transport from A to B – cost of train from one place to another; work out how much it would cost to get to Manly from your house by ferry, train, bus or car….

Physical

Write yourself an exercise program

Practise a new skill each day

Play Twister with a friend

Creative Activities

Create your own Christmas cards / gift cards

Create a colouring book for a younger sibling or friend with your drawings

On large paper, potato print your own wrapping paper.

Plant and care for a vegetable plot

Remember a balance of structured and non structured activities is good for all and encourages creative opportunities….

Quiet time – is equally important for all….

Happy holidays

Katrina James – Learning Enhancement