The Power of Using Games for Learning

‘Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for our contestants tonight! We have Magnificent Mumu and Terrific Tara. Contestants, are you ready for your challenge?

‘Terrific Tara, what’s 2+3?’

‘Oh that’s easy, 5!’

‘Oh my, oh my, I can’t believe it! Isn’t he terrific, tactful, tantalizing (peals of silent laughter from David 🤣🤣. Well, you come up and try it, sir!)

‘Magnificent Mumu, what’s 7+3?’

’10!’

‘What? You didn’t even take time to think? That blew my mind. You are magnificent for sure, and marvelous and…(mind block, this is hard!) magical 😁.’

Inspiration to learn

And so, on went the game inspired by what I had seen my brother- and sister-in-law do to their son to encourage him to finish his food. It certainly worked like a charm! I had seen my daughter start to enjoy Math. Earlier, she had started signs of getting discouraged because she struggled some with the numbers. Somehow, her little brother imbibed the lessons quietly and he surprised me by joining in and actually doing great at it. Now they both ask for more challenging questions. Time and again we are told random Math facts, and we have to be ‘amazed’.

One day, there was a magnifying glass on the table. A thought just came into my head to ask ‘Detective Mumu’ to help me solve a puzzling case. I just couldn’t figure what I had to add to 9 to get 14. Enthusiastically, she solved the mystery for me. The day before, it had really been an uphill climb to do the same tasks.

Games help children to thrive. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. On one hand they enjoy their childhood, on the other, they can develop mentally, physically or even spiritually.

Experimenting and dramatizing

We had never played bingo before, but at some point in her curriculum, to help her with reading we had to play sight word bingo. Never mind if we did it properly, but she certainly enjoyed it! To encourage her with her creative writing, she has done some presentations on camera. Unfortunately, we were more excited on the projects than she was! We will definitely try again some time later; some performance is better when one has the initiative, right?

Sometimes we do not plan these games but they randomly come. We do quite a bit of reading for them, some during devotion, especially during evening worship; and also bed-time stories. From the stories we can extract a quick and simple Math problem for them. That brings arithmetic from book knowledge to real life experiences. The kids love dramatizing bible stories, and we do that a lot. Sometimes it could just be a mime as the story is read, but they love it all the same. We do believe in, and have experienced the power of using games for learning!