My Sister, My Competition

Games are an important part of educational  play methodology and the beauty with this teaching strategy is that it grows with the children throughout their early years education. 

The girls had mentally outstripped their games last year and whilst they still enjoy playing them they needed a new challenge. I devised a verbal quiz  specifically tailored to their curriculum, across all the subjects and we played it during breakfast time and initially they loved it and found it fun. 

The girls mental processes soon became apparent when they started answering questions on a daily basis. Kira has an extremely high response speed and can fire back answers at super cat speed. She would answer first and would be accurate the majority of the time. Sophia needs a longer response time, needs to process, sometimes she would answer the day after. 

Therefore this quiz style of gaming quickly became stressful for Sophia and the competitiveness was unhealthy as Sophia started to believe she wasn't smart. I changed tactics and instead directed specific questions to each girl taking it in turns. The activity then became fun for Sophia again. 

This turn of events inspired me to want to create a family game centred around their curriculum, that had a healthy level of competition within it, but which was a bonding family activity. 

A board game is a great educational activity at this age: They have to learn to read a dice, to count the spaces on the board and to take turns. An extra layer of skill can be added by having two dice in play, so they can practice addition. 

I brought an amazing kit from Amazon which supplied the plain box, playing board, cards, counter and dice. I spent a night designing it on paper and then made the board. To keep their interest there had to be a different quest on every square, with a different purpose in mind. 

I wanted it to remain fun and not be too heavily snowed under with educational questions. Some squares had daft instructions, meant to make us laugh, for example to pat your head, rub your belly, do five jumping jacks, or say the alphabet as quick as possible. Other squares contained self reflective questions for us to share personal details with each other, to encourage bonding and make the girls think about personal questions surrounding personal identity. These questions included What's your favourite food, pet, What makes you happy? 

Finally there were three category subjects, and the squares were marked with an E, M or S and there were three stack of cards containing English, maths and science questions based from the existing quiz questions.

English questions included:

* What is a contraction? 

* Give an example of an action word

* Spell certain words

Math examples included: 

* Counting in 100s

* Count down 20-1

* Count in multiples of 2 5 and 10

* Simple addition questions within 1-5. 

Science questions included: 

*  How many bones do we have? 

* Name 5 organs

* Name the planets

* What three conditions produce photosynthesis? 

* Name the parts of trees and plants

If you got an answer correct, you move forward a space. There were gaps between certain spaces and to jump the gap you had to say the colour of the arrow in Japanese.

There was equal opportunity for all players. Sometimes the girls wanted us all to play, sometimes they'd play against each other without me being in the room, and occasionally they would  play it by themselves. They absolutely love it and it's been a resounding success. I absolutely recommend this activity for the family.