Often, when I suggest using games to improve learning, many parents first believe that coming up with a game for every learning situation is something very hard to do.

Well, first of all, every learning situation doesn’t require a game and games don’t have to be used every single time you want learning to take place.

Secondly, games are actually not that hard to come up with and are even sometimes very easy to prepare and set up.

Here are some games that you can actually adapted to many different learning situations and that are very easy to set up.

Four in a row

I have used this game countless of times. All you need is a grid of some kind. It may contain numbers or words and you need some way or rule to be able to randomly place a colored pawn on the grid. The first one to get four in a row wins the game.

 

In maths you can use a pre-printed 100 board which is easy enough to find. And the game can be used to recognize numbers, read them aloud, find the tens and the units, and various other ways.

 

 

For reading you can make a grid on a white board and have the same words on cut pieces of paper that players pick from a bag.

Same for writing except that the other player will read the word picked out loud while the player whose turn it is needs to write it down before placing his pawn. You may want to hide the grid while he writes.

For smaller grids, you can make it a three in a row rather.

 

Blank board game

Any blank board game with a dice can be a quick learning game.

In all the years I’ve worked with children, I probably only created 3 or 4 game boards that I used over and over in different situations and with different learning target.

Here are 2 of them that I used all the time. Kids, as long as they get to play, don’t mind seeing the same board!

All you need then is some flash cards or questions that suits the topic at hand. These are easy enough to make and most of the time won’t take much time to prepare.

 

Throw and catch

Put ‘ball’ and ‘catch’ in the same sentence, and you’ve got a killer game!

Children always love it. Even when there is some learning involved.

Here, you can see such a game used to learn letters of the alphabet and to play with words.

Another variant of the game is with numbers and sequences. For example, picking out a number and counting from 3 to 3 and see who can reach or go beyond that number first.

Another would be to list a group of related item. A player can only throw the ball if he finds an object corresponding to the category mentioned. When someone is stuck he looses the game.