Playing Board Games with your kids

I will never forget the hours and hours we sat around the table or on the floor playing games with our kiddos. We always had a Friday night game night. It was while our kids were young and not into a busy social calendar yet. So they were not thinking of other things to draw them away from family time.

Here’s how it went down:

First, we numbered ALL, yes ALL of our games that were age appropriate for our three kids. That included some for younger kid/kids and some for older ones. If it was too hard for the youngest, one of the older kids would play along with him/her or one of the adult would play with that one. They caught on quickly so that didn’t happen often.

Next, after numbering the games we put corresponding numbers into a cup or the proverbial hat and took turns drawing numbers.  Everyone got the chance to draw a number on game night. Since we had five people in our family that meant we played five games that night before we stopped. And we ALL played whatever games matched that number. We had a no complaining rule when it came to actually playing some of the games. Because some of them were gender specific and that was the time when a whine or a complaint might rear its ugly head. So we nipped it in the bud and set down some rules before the gaming started.The games played that night were set aside so the next week we had a chance to play other games that we had. After playing them all we put them all back into the stack and started over again.

Finally, just a note to encourage you to make this an activity that your family participates in regularly because before you know it that will all be grown and only interested in video games… (not that there’s anything wrong with video games …you can use that as a fun family time as well,  just don’t do that instead of the board games).

These are some of the fondest memories I have with my kids because we were all together having fun. And watching them grow and learn is just amazing.

Here are some of the games we played together as a family:

These are just a few of the games we played. (Opps…One of them got posted twice. Oh well. ) There were others, of course. These are so many more games on the market now so get to your local toy store and start buying some games to play with your children.

Below is an interesting website that talks about playing games with your children.

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=2060

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