I’ve been playing games with two young children and it has been quite entertaining. We play Uno and Hive and Labyrinth, along with a version of Go Fish. They are sharks. They also love to gang up on me even if it means they forget to strategize about each other. The five-year old has made it quite clear that my job is to lose, if I want him to keep playing. This is not the seven-year old’s idea, exactly. His idea is that he is going to beat me fair and square, with occasional help, when he’s about to make a mistake. When I’m about to make a mistake, he just watches. (And by this time, the help is not in every game, just saying.)

Here’s an example. Hive is a strategy game that is similar to Chess in that there are several different kinds of pieces with rules for how they move. The objective is to surround the queen piece of the opposite team. There are seven different kinds of pieces, and eleven total pieces for each side in the version we are using, so the playing possibilities are quite different from chess. The seven-year old is much better than I am at imagining how to use different pieces. I am better at keeping the end goal in mind. It is important that I win, now and then, so that when he beats me, he knows that he actually beat me. The five-year old simply can’t beat me or his brother yet. If he played by himself against me, it would be like being the constant loser in a classroom. At the moment he can only help another player, but! he really can help, because he can see how to move all the different pieces at a given moment in the game. Occasionally he sees moves that his partner, whoever it is, is about to miss.

And frankly, I love watching these two different brains in action. **

Apart from kid watching which I find endlessly fascinating, I’ve had an interesting education in what different games teach. Go Fish eventually teaches children how to hold cards so that everyone else can’t see them. It also teaches following the rules, whatever they are in a given household, and it’s a good one for learning not to cheat. Uno has some similar lessons but it’s a bit more advanced in the player interactions. Hive doesn’t really lend itself to cheating because nothing is hidden, as it is in card games. Hive is strategy. Labyrinth requires serious 2-D visualization. This is great stuff to learn but causes a lot of heartburn along the way.

I’ve commented about Daniel Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School, in previous posts. The book is relevant here as well. Willingham says that when an experience is constantly unrewarding, people do not want to continue with it. This sounds obvious, but applications of this principle are tricky in a classroom. A student who is constantly failing needs to be removed from that situation if anyone wants him to actually learn as opposed to simply hating what’s going on. That’s hard with only one teacher for twenty-five kids. One grandmother with a couple of grandkids can work harder at keeping track of this principle.

** The almost three-year old is determined to place a piece on the table for Hive or Labyrinth, and it is NOT going to be moved. Why would you want to move the piece she put down?! The baby is determined to be part of whatever others are enjoying. And those cute little colored tiles that click are incredibly enticing, and almost in reach from Grammy’s lap. Woohoo! Dig your toes into her and launch!