How Board Games Can Help Your Children Learn

Think back to your childhood school days. What do you remember? Sitting and listening to a teacher blah blah blah about something, or playing and experiencing things hands-on?

Many childhood education experts now agree that most children learn better by doing hands on activities in order to learn. But that does not mean that every lesson must be a laboratory experiment. Classic board games can help make your children smarter. Not only will they practice basic reading and math skills, but they will also learn problem solving, strategy, and critical thinking skills.

Even before your children reach school age, board games can teach them valuable skills. Playing these games can better prepare them for their school lessons.

Preschool board games that make your child smarter:

1) Candyland

With this classic board game, younger children will learn about taking turns, cause and effect, and especially colors. Since, instead of using a die or spinner, Candyland used colorful cards to determine a move, the children must recognize basic colors in order to play.

2) Chutes and Ladders

In the board game Chutes and Ladders, children will learn more about counting and taking turns. Also, if you discuss the small pictures by the chutes and ladders on the game board, this board game can help your children learn about positive and negative consequences of their actions.

3) Memory Match Games

These games consist of a group of cards on which are printed pairs of pictures, words, numbers, colors, or anything else. It is easy to create this type of game yourself. These memory match games will help your child improve their memory skills, and to recognize difference in pictures or patterns, a valuable skill when learning many other things.

Playing board games can also help older, school age children. They are very useful to cement ideas and concepts in a child's head and provide entertaining and educational hands-on practice of real world skills.

Five board games and how they will help your children learn:

1) Monopoly

Monopoly can teach your children a multitude of subjects. They practice addition by adding the dice together to see how far they move. They must know how to add the money together and make change if necessary. Children's reading skills will be called into use with the Chance and Community Chest cards as well as the property names and information.

2) Checkers & Chess

Checkers and Chess are the ultimate strategy games. These classic board games will utilize your children's' critical thinking skills and their ability to predict several moves in the future.

3) Sorry, Ludo, Trouble

Simple games like Sorry, Ludo, and Trouble will help your children reinforce counting and adding skills. As they get more skilled, your children can learn about strategy as well: is it better to knock the opponent back to start, or advance further yourself?

4) Scrabble

Scrabble comes in different forms. The classic scrabble will obviously help your children discover new words and reinforce their spelling skills. There are also junior scrabble games in which you must build sentences out of word tiles rather than words out of letter tiles. Scrabble is a great board game to help your child learn.

5) Clue & Guess-Who

Clue is the classic board game of "Who Done It?" and Guess Who is a game in which opponents ask yes and no questions to deduce what character their opponent has on a card. Both of these games are very good for helping your children learn deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills.

Playing board games is a fun way to help your children learn. From basic skills to more complex subjects such as economics and strategy, board games provide a fabulous way to get the hands-on experience with topics that are vital to their learning and their entire lives.