Besides being fun, playing games with your preschooler is very valuable in supporting growth in across developmental domains. When you play games together kids get the opportunity to practice social skills such as turn taking, encouraging others, dealing with the disappointment of “losing” and the fun in playing over winning. Besides helping kids become more pro-social, games also work on academic and cognitive skills in an authentic, low stress way. Games allow kids to work on sorting, strategizing, number and letter recognition, memory and even the youngest toddler who waits for their turn is building self-control and emotional regulation.

My kids are seven years apart so they were working on very different skills over the years but we were still able to play, and enjoy, games together by:

• Team-Up

When playing cards, match up young kids with a partner to hold the cards for them and ask questions to keep them on track. But let the child choose and place the card themselves. My kids still enjoy playing kids vs. parents for certain games.

“Do you have green card? Do you see an 8?”

Work on “easy” crosswords together- read the clue out loud, let them think of the answer, you fill in the puzzle or tell them the letters to write.

• Play games that allow for different levels of play

Blokus was a favorite! Young ones simply need to place colored pieces on the board but older kids and adults can begin to strategize all while playing the same game. Also builds geometry vocabulary if you use terms “edge, point, rotate, flip”

• Say what you are thinking out loud—especially for strategy games—to help your child begin thinking about the game.

“I’m drawing an X here so you don’t get a tic-tac-toe” “Oh, You blocked me—good move” “If I had a 7 I would have had a pair”

Any game will be valuable when you play together
However, here are a few suggestions:

• Tic-tac-toe

• Tapatan

• Card Games—Uno, Go Fish, Crazy 8s, Memory, War (we just called this “Most”)

• Blokus

• Clack

• Hiss

• Pass the Pigs

• Connect the Dots

• Connect Four