Let’s Explore — Kids Learning Games
Anyone with young children knows that kids love to learn as much as they love to play. By incorporating learning games into everyday activities, you can give your child the best of both. Learning games do not have to be relegated to the classroom. Every activity offers an opportunity. Let’s explore some of those now.
Many people want to start with games already designed for learning. Structured learning games have the advantage of being organized, complete with undisputable rules. These are a good place to start, until your imagination takes over and you start finding opportunities in nearly every activity.
Letter recognition is incorporated into many learning games as it is the basis for learning to read. You can devise a game to help keep your child occupied and learning at the same time when you are out shopping or running errands. Pick a “letter of the day” and see how many times your child can find that letter on signs throughout the day. This helps your child not only get the particular letter down, but also helps him or her recognize the letter when it is written in various styles.
Another learning game, especially for older children learning punctuation is what I call the “purple people eater game”. With this game, you take the line from the song that goes “he was a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater”. Have your child place commas in various places in the sentence and show how that changes the meaning of the phrase. We often found ourselves laughing too hard to continue after a few minutes of this particular learning game.
Not to leave out math in your learning games adventure, cars make perfect learning objects. Younger kids can learn their colors or how to count by counting the cars of a particular color that pass by. Older kids can learn things like percentages by counting how many cars of each color pass by and figuring out the percentage of each color.
Learning comes so naturally to kids that they will welcome the chance to incorporate learning games into their daily activities. It may possibly become so much a part of your daily routine, that you will find yourself doing errands alone one day and making complete sentences from the letters on license plates or figuring out that ten percent of the drivers you pass own green cars.