Washington Parent Magazine

Among the obvious benefits of sitting down and playing a good old-fashioned game with your children is the opportunity that games provide to apply and solidify the mathematical reasoning and calculating skills your children are learning in school. Perceptual and verbal skills have both been linked to mathematical achievement levels. That is, math does not only involve strong number skills. It also involves visual-perceptual skills, auditory perceptual and verbal skills, as well as strong logical thinking skills and fine motor skills. 

Visual perceptual skills help your child to keep his written computations organized with aligned columns. They also help him to differentiate between the symbols, shapes and sizes found in math. They help him to understand the part-whole concepts needed for fractions, to and understand sequential concepts (e.g., before and after). Auditory perceptual and verbal skills help your child to distinguish between similar sounding numbers (e.g., 13 and 30; 1000 and 1000th), follow directions, follow oral drills and dictated assignments, count on from within a sequence, explain why a problem is solved as it is, write numbers from dictation and comprehend story problems. Abstract and logical reasoning skills help your child to solve story problems, compare sizes using symbols, understand number patterns, understand place-value concepts and apply concepts to symbols. Finally, fine-motor skills are needed for completing written calculations and manipulating concrete materials. 

Up until children are 6 years old, their primary way of learning about the world is through their senses. Between 2 and 6 years they are laying the foundation skills needed for learning mathematical concepts. These include understanding concepts such as more- or less-than, before and after, categorizing, making sets, finding pairs and making one-to-one correspondence, sequencing, identifying parts of a whole, understanding cause-effect relationships, recognizing patterns, rote counting skills, and recognizing numbers. Games that help build the concepts of more or less-than include Don't Spill the Beans and Lucky Ducks. Games such as Candy Land and Shoots and Ladders help to build the concepts of "before" and "after". Concepts that include balance, cause-effect, making predictions, logical and visual reasoning and fine motor skills include Don't Spill the Beans, Spaghetti Game and Don't Break the Ice. Lucky Ducks and Potato Head are two more games that build fine motor skills, as well as one-to-one correspondence, part-whole concepts, matching, and memory. Higher level skills such as memory, concentration, attention, identifying sets, number identification and recognition of dot patterns of numbers can be solidified by playing games such as Bingo, The Memory Game and Cootie. Finally, rote counting skills can easily be incorporated into all of these games by parents. 

Starting around 6 years, children begin to attach meaning to the numbers they have previously learned by rotE. For example, 7 is 1 more than 6, not just the number that comes after 6 when you are counting aloud. They can use objects and manipulatives to understand mathematical concepts and numbers. From the ages of 4 to 11 children need objects in the physical world to learn about abstract mathematical concepts. Their memory for math facts can be reinforced in any game by incorporating the rule of answering one to three flash cards correctly before taking a turn. Games such as Chinese Checkers, Checkers,Connect Four and Battleship all build the visual perceptual organization skills needed to read and build charts and graphs and to align columns in long mathematical problems. Planning, cause-effect, and logical reasoning skills are also addressed by those games as well as games such as Clue Junior and Guess Who. Card games, including games like Uno, and any card tricks, build sequencing, memory and number pattern recognition, as well as mental computation skills such as addition and skip counting. Dominos is another good game to build visual memory for number patterns, as well as fine motor skills. Games such as Monopoly Junior begin to build basic money skills and doubling skills, while games such as Clue Junior and Guess Who build the problem-solving skills that will become increasingly important as your child progresses through his school math classes. 

Starting around 11 to 12 years, children begin to reason and think about numbers and concepts at the abstract level. The games children this age can play become significantly more complicated, and the games' connections to math skills become more obvious. However children continue to benefit from the multisensory, interactive and experiential nature of the game format for learning well into their young adult years. Reading large numbers and building place-value concepts are skills exercised in games such as Masterpiece, Careers and Life. It is at this stage that many games incorporate money skills into their formatS. Careers, Life, Monopoly, Easy Money and Pay Day incorporate money skills that range from the very basic such as counting money and determining correct change, to advanced concepts and skills such as bankruptcy, inflation, taxes, rent, salary, accounting, bartering and bidding, interest, mortgaging, bills, loans and budgeting. Many games incorporate higher thinking skills. For instance, games like Masterpiece, Careers, Monopoly, Life, Clue, Backgammon, and particularly Master Mind all exercise logical and deductive reasoning, predicting and planning, problem solving, and visual perceptual and organizational skills. Some of these games even build higher level math concepts such as fractions, ratios, and percentages into their formats. 

Professional educators disagree about many theories. However, most educators agree that children learn best by becoming actively engaged in experiences that allow them to interact and discuss ideas and concepts with other learners. Games are a great way for parents to provide learning experiences for their children that are engaging, interactive and most importantly, fun! Board games are especially good for building mathematical concepts and skills. They are fun and engage all the senses (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and motor). Because learning is a social process, children learn best through fun activities that involve interaction with other people, all the senses and the opportunity to act out concepts using physical representations. There are many commercial games that offer all of these, making them ideal learning tools. So, go ahead and turn off your TV and even the computer, and try a good old-fashioned board game with your kids. A price can not be put on the quality of the time you will have spent with your children. They will have fun while learning, and they will remember those times with greater fondness than the times they spent playing the educational computer games or watching the educational TV programs. 

Julie Tiss is the Director of Tiss' Tutoring and Testing, a member of WISER and the mother of two.  You can reach her by e-mail at: jtiss@gmu.edu.