Using Board Games in the Classroom

I have fond memories of playing board games as a child. My sister and I used to play Risk to keep ourselves entertained on trips to Grandma's house-we just kind of made up our own game out of it because we were a little young to understand world domination! We would also play things like Life and Monopoly as a family. My sister, whose zodiac sign is an Aries was not always a good sport, but we had fun.

I think there is a lot you can learn from playing a board game. Sometimes it's strategy-like whether or not to buy Boardwalk. Sometimes it's all about luck-win or lose at the roll of the dice. One of the most important lessons, I think, is learning how to lose. Everyone loses in life and I think it's really important we teach our young ones the responsible way to lose. One of my theories about why kids are having issues as they grow up today is that no one ever taught them how to lose. Do you know when I worked in daycare many years ago, we were required to play Musical Chairs without taking out any chairs?! The music stops, everyone sits down--yeah for everyone. Nope, not in my room.

Part of the problem is where to fit them in. I know many people are doing things like the Daily 5 strategies-but that could absolutely be a word work station. This is a Candyland game where I wrote the consonant blends on the squares and put pics of words on the cards-the students moved to the sound they heard. I have also done it with vowel sounds.

You can also easily give them games in their math workstations:

And you know what, I even just teach my kids how to play chess every year just for fun. I hope no admin walks in at that point and asks what objective we are fulfilling, beause certainly it's not part of our curriculum-but I think it's important, so I squeeze it in.

At first when I introduce a game, I actually have to teach them not to count the space they are on when they move and how to figure out who goes first and just go around the table. Quite often they will come up and tell me someone is cheating and when I ask cheating how? They answer by saying, well-he keeps winning. They have no frame of reference for these experiences because many of them have not played a board game before-everything is digital now-just not the same.