Adding fun to learning is an excellent teaching strategy. Apart from the academics, a good school is also judged on the basis that how often the teachers indulge their students in interesting games and activities that are educational and fun at the same time. Parents can also do so; all they have to do is find a game that the teens nowadays find cool.
Games for Child Brain Development
Games allow children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive and emotional strength. Games are important to healthy brain development. Games help children learn at a very early age the art of engaging and interacting with the world. Games allow children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practising adult roles, sometimes in conjunction with other children or adult caregivers. As they master their world, games help children develop new competencies that lead to enhanced confidence and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges.
According to research, educational games have a consistent growth rate of 21.6% and the global revenues are expected to triple by 2022.
To help you find the right learning games that can impress your teenager, I have compiled a list of some interesting educational games and activities for teens and pre-teens.
These games engage children and at the same time develop their social, cognitive, and logical skills. The primary objective of these games and activities is to help children learn about different subjects practically. They can also benefit by using learning games to reinforce specific concepts and understand historical events and situations.
1. Monopoly:
Robert Kiyosaki, in his top-selling book “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” emphasised the importance of financial education.
Monopoly is one of the most popular fun learning games for teens. The game is played with an aim to create wealth and the obstacles that one may face when they try to make money. The game can be played by a maximum of 6 participants.
This is great for practising basic math skills and also getting comfortable with different denominations of currency.
As adults, we understand how savings for the future are important for uncertain emergencies. You need to stash away some cash for those hard times. Through the game, you can teach children to put some of their earnings in a different pile for those game “emergencies.” If they don’t have the cash to pay for something like repairs or rent, then they will have to sell their assets at a steep discount.
Money management is one of those life skills that is often overlooked because people consider it a topic or concern for the grown-ups. However, it’s not the case.
It is vital for your child to understand the importance of money from an early age.
And who can deny that board games are fun for children?
2. Twenty Questions:
Twenty Questions is a guessing game, which can be played anytime, anywhere.
The number of participants:
Minimum – 2, Maximum – 12
You will need:
Paper and pen for keeping score
How to play:
- Divide the participants into teams of equal numbers.
- The host can select one person from the list of names, and the teams have to ask the right kind of questions to narrow their options and guess the name of the personality.
- The team scores a point if they can guess who the person is before they exhaust the 20 questions.
- If the team fails, the other two teams get one chance each to guess who the person is, based on the questions asked.
“Twenty questions” game teaches deductive reasoning and tests the teen’s knowledge of history and current affairs.
3. Jenga:
Jenga is one of the best games that require skills and a strategy.
Basically, the game goes like this:
- You need 54 wooden blocks to play this game.
- You build a tower, and then remove the blocks one by one.
- Make sure that you aren’t the one who makes it fall.
- Jenga has to be played with the highest dexterity and it requires sharp eyes. You have to successfully remove the little wooden pieces and proceed with building the structure higher until the structure collapses.
A sloppy beginning can ruin everything. A carelessly constructed tower makes for a short game. Poorly envisioned and executed structure lays the beam for a quick downfall. Aren’t all these qualities worth learning for children to face real-life struggles?
When you go just piling up the pieces, it’s only a matter of time before everything comes down. No one wants to be a loser. Being disorganised can make you lose everything.
4. Mad Libs:
Who doesn’t have fun with Mad Libs around a campfire?
However, if you’ve never played before, here’s how it works:
- Each Mad Libs story has blank words to fill in (you’ll choose nouns, adjectives, emotions, places, etc.) and you can read the full story after you’ve picked your words.
- You can get various Mad Libs puzzles online that are great for teens. Or, you can download an application on your classroom device. You can find the official Mad Libs app on the Apple Store or Google Play.
- Just go around the table asking for nouns, verbs, adjectives and more to your students. For ways to get your students more involved, have them write down the words themselves or spell them out for you.
Mad Libs game can be a test for their knowledge of grammar and parts of speech, and the results can be hilarious.
5. Hangman Word Game:
Hangman is a popular guessing game. It can keep the teens excited right from the start. The players have to guess the right word before they run out of chances to score a point.
You can play this game with a minimum of 2 members and a maximum of 10 members.
You will need:
A whiteboard and marker
Paper and pen for keeping score
Prepare a list of words or phrases from a specific subject of your choice.
How to play:
- The moderator or host has to pick a word and draw a blank for every letter in the word.
- Players in the team have to guess the possible letters to fill the blanks.
- If they guess a letter right, they guess again and move on until they get the complete word.
- If they guess the letter wrong, the host draws one part of the stick figure of a hanged man.
- The team gets no more chances after the host completes drawing the figure.
Hangman word game makes teenagers judicious while using up their chances and guessing the word correctly.
Also, you can make the game from any subject – math, science, environmental science, history, geography to music, art, and movies.
6. Silence:
It is an appealing game for large groups and challenges children to accomplish tasks together, but without speaking to each other.
The number of participants:
Minimum – 10, Maximum – No limit
You will need:
Post-its
Pens
A lot of space
Paper for keeping score
Setup:
- Write down the names of months, days of the week or any other set of words that have to be arranged in a particular order.
- Keep the post-its ready and do not mix them. For example, avoid mixing the days post-its with months to avoid confusion during the game.
How to play:
- Pick up a set of post-its on which you have listed down the names, numbers, etc.
- Give a sticky note each to one person randomly.
- Make sure that no one has more than one sticky note.
- Once the post-its or sticky notes have been distributed, create space in the front for the activity. Tell the players that they have to arrange themselves in the right order in as little time as possible. For example, you say: “the days of the week in the right order or reverse order”, and players with sticky notes with the days of the week should move to the front and arrange themselves in that order.
- The trick is to do it without speaking at all. There is no competition in this game.
“Silence” game helps children develop organisational, coordination and non-verbal communication skills.
All these games allow children to learn to work in groups, to share and negotiate to resolve conflicts and to learn self-advocacy skills. When the game is allowed to be child driven, children practice decision-making skills, move at their own pace, discover their own areas of interest, and ultimately engage fully in the passions they wish to pursue. Ideally, much of play involves adults, but when the game is controlled by adults, children agree to abide by the rules and concerns. In contrast to passive entertainment, games build active and healthy bodies.
Nalanda International School encourages stress-free learning and active research-driven education, teaching with a holistic method and a place where teaching and learning can take place collaterally. Nalanda International School can be rated as one of the top schools in Vadodara. The results of the school have been continually improving over the years. Contact us today!