Learning Through Play
Stop and go start to the year thanks to covid but students are settling in well all things considering. During lockdown level 3 I had three students and in the afternoons I started teaching them card games to find that none of them knew any card games, not even Go Fish. I taught them how to play and I watched as they worked out the rules, learnt how to take turns (e.g. go in a circle), hold their cards so others couldn't see (a challenging task) and pick cards up without showing others. It did surprise me how little the students knew about games yet how much enjoyment and learning came out of it. It was because of this that I implemented a game of the week in my class as part of maths. Last week we started off playing go fish which was an engaging way to work with my low learners about number recognition. This game could also be used for alphabet recognition. This weeks game was memory which is a harder concept for students to grasp but memorising numbers and paying attention were important things for the students to learn.
As you can see in the photo below some of the students branched out and started writing on whiteboards. A small group of children completed a puzzle together while another group of girls played Pop up Pirate which is a fantastic fine motor task for children.
Watching how much enjoyment and how much learning can be done in those games was a real energising thing for me. I'm interested to see if board games/ card games start to become something they play at home or choose to do during play based learning times.
Does anybody have any must teach games for children? Especially in areas linking to literacy and numeracy?
