Learning with Board Games!

The Board Game is often the forgotten item amongst toys, video games, books and education materials.  It can however be one of the best tools for teaching and can put some fun back into learning.

Do you use Board Games in your home? 

We have quite a lot and my only issues is finding time to play them all (and finding room to store them all!)

Here are 10 great board games that you could use as part of your curriculum: 

1. Scrabble:  Good Old Scabble! Fantastic at practising spelling, sight words & reading. Also great to play what we like to call Theme Scrabble, where the words you create have to be part of the theme like Geography or Science or from a Story or Movie. Theme Scrabble is great for unit studies and furthering topics. 
   
   
   
2. Risk:  This is a favourite here although it can get rather competitive LOL.  This one can help with everything from Geography, Wars, World Trading, to Poverty.  A recent game had my son wanting to accumulate the third world countries to help them and eradicate poverty and hunger. The conversations and learning opportunities with games is endless! 
   
3. The Great Australian Road Trip: This is one I have wanted for years and I recently bought. I was very excited to play it but my son needs to be a little older as many of the questions were too hard and with an ASD child that means a lot of frustration and refusal. However for a child/teen 12 years and over, this is a fantastic game! Covers geography, history, culture and even fun TV facts LOL. 
   
4. Trivial Pursuit:  A classic and lots of options as the game is sold in many themes. junior versions as well as the original version. If you have a child that LOVES learning random facts, they will love this one. 
   
    
5. Pictionary:  This one is also a great game to play no matter the artistic ability.  Can help a child with their drawing skills as well as their communication skills while learning more on a topic. 
   
6. Monopoly:  This one is great for helping with Mathematics! Counting out money, working out how much to pay in rents or whether to buy houses or hotels to increase revenue. So lots of financial planning and forward thinking, budgeting etc. 
   
7. The Game of Life: This one has a bit of everything really. Learning about life and talking to your kids about the future is a great thing and gets them thinking about what they might want to do in a non threatening game environment. Many kids don't think about the future too much so this is a great way to connect with your kids and bring up topics about life your might have trouble bringing up otherwise. 
   
8. Scotland Yard: Fantastic for Map reading! Practice some mapping skills while also working on detective and problem solving skills! 
   
9. UNO Stacko (Combination of Jenga and Uno):  Two great games combined in UNO Stacko. This is good for mathematics, problem solving, risk taking and as my son put it "Engineering and Structural Stability" LOL.  
   
10. Chess : Chess and games like Chinese Checkers and Backgammon help a child with their executive functioning skills, their motor planning skills and problem solving skills.  
    
    
    Now there are many more games out there and this is by no means a 'BEST' list of games, these are just the ones we love to use.  I have many many more on my wish list like Catan (so many versions!), Timeline, Cranium, Geo Dice, Travel Australia Game, Passport to Culture, World Safari, Civilisation ... the list goes on.

My aim with this post was to mention the games we use and why we use them.  As I mentioned at the start, board games get overlooked and thought of as just for fun and for spare time and rainy days.  Just remember they can be very helpful with boosting learning time, consolidating facts and helping with overall functioning and processing. 

So if you have curriculum fog, days where you (both child and teacher) are over it and needing to switch gears, try a board game!