One thing that parents can do to create more play time for their children is to, whenever possible, engage your child in some simple and fun learning games.
There are lots of great games for kids of all ages and here are some examples:
Board Games
Establishing a games night and playing a wide variety of board games with your children provides hours of fun and a real chance for learning.
Games such as Boggle, Scattergories and Scrabble will help improve reading and spelling skills.Playing simple card games such as cribbage, hearts or rummy can help your child develop strategy and math skills.
Pictionary is lots of fun and can help with the development of motor skills.Games such as Monopoly, Sorry, Battleship, Candyland and many others can provide fun learning opportunities for your child.
Scavenger Hunts Or Geocaching
What child doesn’t love to hunt for treasure!
Scavenger hunts and geocaching are great ways to sharpen your child’s sense of direction as well as observation skills.
Best of all, these are perfect group games and playing in a group helps develop your child’s social and communication skills.
Paper Airplane Building
Joining your child in designing and making paper airplanes will enhance their creativity and problem solving ability.
Flying each invention will be great fun for the entire family!
I-Spy
Younger children will enjoy a game of I-Spy which will help them develop observation and communication skills.
Fort Building
What a great way to encourage imagination and problem solving through allowing your child to build a fort out of whatever materials are available.
Best of all, building forts can be done inside or outside, which helps your child develop all types of problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Licence Plate Addition
A fun game to play with your child when traveling by car is to add up the numbers on selected licence plates.
The objective is to see who can come up with the correct answer!A simpler version of this game is to set a time period and see how many licence plates your child sees with a given number on the plate.