Spending 25 years as a homeschooler gave me a different lense to view the world through. When it comes to children, I tend to see everything with an educational perspective. Games are fun. But they should be educational. Dominos are great to stack up and watch them fall–but it’s better to know how to play the game. It’s a game for all ages.

Full disclosure: I once took my entire family on a trip to Disney World and scheduled an “educational tour.”

My kids claimed I was the only mom in the world that could turn a Disney vacation into a school field trip.

No doubt, my grandchildren will one day say something similar about the time they spend in our home. We don’t have games to play on our phones. I’m convinced that much of the children’s programming is killing our grandchildren’s brain cells. 

Therefore, I’ve been on an old fashioned game binge. We are rediscovering Marbles, Jacks and Dominos. As well as, some of the old outside games we used to play as kids.

The good folks over at OurEveryDayLife.com, have laid out a great way to introduce your youngest grandkids to the joys of Dominos. 

“Take advantage of your child’s new domino obsession by enticing him into a counting lesson.”

Place a domino tile with one dot in front of him. Point to the dot and say “one.” Ask your child to point to the dot and repeat, “one.” Repeat this process for tiles that show two and three dots. Ask your tot, “How many dots on this domino?” to promote independent counting. Allow your domino dominator to line up a tile on its end each time he counts the dots correctly. At the culmination of his counting lesson, he gets his reward as he knocks down the domino lineup with gusto.

“Show your child that in addition to placing dominoes on end, he can line them up flat by matching the number of dots on the end of one domino to those on the end of another domino. Show him a domino with one dot and help him find another domino with one dot. Match the ends up together and then celebrate with cheers and claps at his success. Continue matching until either the domino supply or your child’s attention span has run out.

“Play a good old-fashioned game of dominoes. Place the dominoes dot-side down and shuffle them by moving them around at random. Have your child pick seven dominoes, and you do the same. Take turns connecting matching domino ends or blank ends from your pile to those in play, creating an L-shape on the board when running out of space. A player who doesn’t have an appropriate domino to put down has to pick one from the dot-side-down pile. The player to run out of dominoes first is the winner.”

Remember, you don’t have to tell them it’s educational. They’ll have so much fun, why ruin it by letting them know it’s good for them?

 

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