Playing with your (and other people's) children

[Carl Cross]

You all read Kevin’s blog don’t you?

http://kevinandgames.blogspot.com/

You should, it’s ace. I always enjoy reading his session reports and
he’s pointed me in the direction of a couple or three really good
games that had passed me by but sometimes he also comes up with stuff
that really matters. This is one of those times.

In this blog posting ( http://bit.ly/lLfz05 ) he comes across some
evidence that playing games (and interestingly this includes
videogames) has real and measurable educational benefits within a
really, really short space of time.

Go on and read the blog posting if you’ve not done already, I can
wait.

Done?

What struck me about all this is that we know that kids from homes
where there isn’t a culture of reading won’t be exposed to reading and
suffer for it in later life so we put strategies in place to combat
that not least Surestart and Bookstart.

Now read that sentence again but replace “reading” with “play” and
“Surestart” and “Bookstart” with “schools” and “libraries”. Wouldn’t
that be great?

You all probably play with your children. I play with mine and I can
directly attribute his knowledge of counting, colours, turn taking and
lots of other things to certain games. He was comfortable with
negative numbers at 3 due to playing Lost Cities with me which is
pretty amazing I always thought.

I hope he’s also developing social skills as well as improving his
skills in long term planning and reasoning and logic but these aren’t
quite so obvious.

We are in a position to help those kids who don’t get this at home.
This seems to me the perfect rationale for games clubs and activities.
You’re directly contributing to the educational wealth of the nation,
particularly during the holiday periods when skills start to
backslide.

It might be fun but it doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Carl.