Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could turn your child into a genius by playing games and doing projects all day? Technically, you can, but none of us are willing to risk it except for home schoolers in Montana.
Here are some of our favorite games. On the way to 99% these games become very competitive high stakes cage matches. These games are fairly age independent and work through different levels of certain cognitive skills. All best practices from previous article apply here.
When my child was between the ages of 2 and 5, we would play this game in lieu of getting to bed on time. Any dollar store or drug store has a pack of animals, dinosaurs, and fish. Get all of them.
Find a messy room. Uncleaned bedrooms are ideal. Ask your child to leave the room and close the door. Hide the animals in plane sight. Invite your child to come back into the room, sit down, and from their vantage point - without moving - identify each animal in their hiding place.
The rules vary at age 2. There's no way you can ask a 2 year old to sit in one place; instead she'll run around the room collecting animals.
- As your child develops visual acuity, hide the animals more carefully so that only a small portion is visible.
- Close your eyes, and ask your child to describe where and how the animal is hidden, including orientation. Vary the orientation.
- Invite your child to take a turn hiding the animals for you. When the child is 2, he will hide the animals in the exact same places that you did and jump up and down and dance next to each animal gesturing wildly and laughing while you pretend you don't see the turtle in the exact place you hid the turtle on your turn.
- Don't forget to wiki each of the animals and use the proper name. Vocabulary is king in cognitive skills.
Over time, you should see the direct result of their growing skill set, e.g.in the nonverbal section of practice tests.
Say a word backwards and ask your child what the word is. For example, is erutinruf is furniture.
One nice thing about this game is that it can be played anywhere, including the car. Another nice thing about this game is that it covers the gamut of cognitive skills from starter skills to very advanced IQ test taking skills. If your child has to sit for the WISC, this is your game. Finally, there are unlimited variants of this game, like anagrams and word scrambles.
If your child is learning phonics, stick with 3 letter words.
If your child is preparing for an IQ test, use a lot of simple 2 syllable words, like schoolbus or subway. There is an important reason for this approach. The path from an IQ of 100 to an IQ of 172 is algorithms, and IQ tests like words, so your child needs to become adept at word algorithms. In this case, the algorithm to solve subloohcs in 1/10th the time is to solve 'sub' and 'loohcs'.
In the absence of algorithms, your child will build working memory. This game is the working memory builder while your child struggles with sbuloohcs slowly and carefully with repeated do overs. It is both enjoyable and painful for me to watch a child plod along with the standard approach.
To make the game more fun, play the game in a public setting where there are posters and signs and billboards and choose a word that your child can find. Your child will be exercising a few important sub-skills while comparing each visible word to the backwards word. Repetition is an opportunity for your child to invent shortcuts.
The only way to get from linear thinking to algorithmic thinking is for you not to tell your child the rule that problem decomposition is 10 times as fast, but make them struggle the hard way (building working memory) until they figure it out for themselves. If your child is 10, and they don't show dramatic improvement in 4 weeks, explain the easier way.
The rules of this game are simple. You say, 'I'm thinking of something in this room and it's color is green'. Then your child looks around and guesses which green object you are thinking about.
How do you turn this game into a cognitive skills builder? The green object could be a the small plant in a painting on the wall, or the red object could be their lips. Not a bad start. Do these things as well. But no, this will not do.
'I'm thinking of an object that slightly smaller than the previous object but is used by the same profession'. You just nailed both figure matrices and word analogies. If your child has to sit for the COGAT and not the WISC 5, this is your game.
Games are a fun way to pass the time on the march to 99%, but you're not going to get there by playing the average version of games at the average level.
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