The game of Scrabble is a family favourite that can be played by young or old. This article will explore why Scrabble is such a great game for kids and the type of skills you pass on to your children as you play scrabble with them.
There are few games that teach as many relevant life skills to children as Scrabble. First of all is the obvious development of vocabulary skills, spelling, and word usage. Regular Scrabble play 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 push the child’s usage of words using scrabble in this way, and encourage the child to use a dictionary to find the definitions of words they haven’t encountered before the child’s vocabulary will develop much faster.
This sort of gamification of the learning process builds a healthy understanding of words, and enables a child to find the definitions to words themselves. Encouraging this will allow a child to explore new word concepts on their own, and develop a muscle memory for recognizing common patterns in words, as well as recognizing unfamiliar patterns 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 coupled with the competitive atmosphere of Scrabble incentivizes a child to keep score correctly.
Scrabble also develops a healthy competitive streak while encouraging patience and turn-taking. Scrabble requires concentration to create word combinations out of the available tiles in the player’s rack, and sometimes it can take time and a lot of patience to come up with a scrabble word. Encouraging a child to take their time to create the best possible word develops skills in problem solving for other areas of their life. Playing with several children requires that they patiently wait for others to finish, a very useful trait.
Finally, the ‘challenge’ aspect of Scrabble whereby a player can challenge a word as misspelled, or not belonging to the scrabble dictionary allows a child to test the boundaries of authority, building their confidence. This is a safe environment for a child to challenge an adult, and develops skill in recognizing 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.
