Why Scrabble is a great game for kids
Scrabble is a family favorite that can be played by young and old. This article will explore why Scrabble is such a great game for kids and the type of skills you are imparting to your kids while playing Scrabble with them.
Few games teach children as many relevant life skills as Scrabble. First and foremost is the obvious development of vocabulary skills, spelling and word usage. Playing Scrabble regularly with an adult builds a vocabulary beyond what a child experiences in the classroom, on television, or in the books they read. If an adult can encourage the child’s use of words using Scrabble in this way, and encourage the child to use a dictionary to find the definitions of words they have not encountered before, the child’s vocabulary will develop much faster.
This kind of gamification of the learning process builds a healthy understanding of words and allows the child to find only the definitions of the words. Encouraging this will allow the child to independently explore new word concepts and develop muscle memory for recognizing common patterns in words as well as recognizing unfamiliar patterns such as misspellings.
Secondly, Scrabble encourages basic number skills in terms of counting word scores, calculating triple word, double word, triple letter and double letter scores. This level of math is a good practical example of how numbers are used in the real world and combined with the competitive atmosphere of Scrabble encourages the child to keep a correct score.
Scrabble also develops a healthy competitive streak while encouraging patience and turn-taking. Scrabble requires concentration to create combinations of words from the available tiles in the player’s stack and can sometimes take time and a lot of patience to come up with scrabble word. Encouraging a child to take time to create the best possible word develops problem-solving skills in other areas of his life. Playing with multiple kids requires them to patiently wait for others to finish, a very useful trait.
Finally, the “challenge” aspect of Scrabble, where a player can challenge a word as misspelled or not belonging to the Scrabble vocabulary, allows a child to test the limits of authority, building their confidence. It is a safe environment for a child to challenge an adult and develop skills to recognize when it is appropriate to stand up for themselves. Scrabble remains a family favorite for these reasons and for the simple fact that it’s fun.
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