How to Use Educational Games to Prepare Your Child for their First Year of School
Introduction
Starting the much anticipated first grade is a crucial step in your child’s education. This is the time when you need to pay a little extra attention to your child’s learning activities to make sure they are developing their critical and cognitive thinking abilities.
Preparing for first grade is no easy job for a parent. Incorporating educational games into your child’s daily routine is highly helpful in this regard. Research has shown that gamifying education through educational games is an efficient way of boosting children’s overall mental development.
What are Educational Games?
Any game that engages with a child critically and intellectually is essentially an educational game. In this internet age, several ed-tech companies have come up with demographic-specific educational games targeted towards specific age groups. These digital games stimulate a learning environment for your child akin to a classroom setting.
Alternatively, you can also go old school and introduce your child to the joys of traditional board games. Jigsaws, puzzles, board and card games, and building games like legos, are all funky and fun ways of training your kid’s memory, logic, creativity and problem-solving skills.
Introducing your child to these games from an early age will make them confident and unfazed in a new environment, allowing for an easy transition process as your child starts their first year of school.
Why Are They Useful?
These educational games end up being especially helpful in the first year of school as kids can play many such games in groups, making it the perfect opportunity for them to make friends. Role-playing and playing acting games using props and costumes bring out the creative and imaginative aspect in kids while group games like class surveys, treasure hunts, classroom decoration games etc foster leadership skills, inquisitive nature and community feeling among kids.
Digital gaming platforms offer parents an easy way to redirect their child’s digital time towards something productive. These platforms offer a range of interactive, subject-based games that make studying fun by gamifying the learning process. Now, instead of fighting with your kid over their screen time, you can simply turn it into a productive experience by switching them to a maths or English game.
How to Pick the Right Educational Game
It is important to choose games for your kid that align with their age group, preferences and maturity to avoid them getting bored or disinterested in such games easily. Opt for games designed for your child’s age range, levelling up as per the kid’s proficiency.
For first graders, opt for games with simple numbers, counting, word and shape matches, and mathematical basics like addition, subtraction, comprehension problems, etc. Prodigy offers a range of maths and English games from grade 1 to grade 8 for you to choose from. For offline gaming, fun quizzes, object counting games, interactive stories in choose-your-own-ending format, lego games, etc can be a good way of mixing learning and play.
Conclusion
Including educational games in your child’s daily routine helps them prepare for their school work in a stress-free and fun way while also cutting back on their screen time. Gamifying education has been proven as a highly efficient mode of learning, especially for young minds. Give educational games a try to start your child on the path to academic excellence.
