One of the best ways to help children learn fundamental principles such as patience, understanding, honesty and good behavior is without a doubt through games. By creating a fun and entertaining experience children will be able to grasp the differences between behavior that is encouraged and praised while slowly discouraging behaviors that don’t meet acceptable societal norms. It is important to introduce these principles at an early age since a child’s brain is starting to shape and absorb new observations from the environment.
In this OneHowTo article we dig into the best games for teaching children right and wrong.
Cooperation games
Games that encourage children to help one another will teach them that offering help alongside communicating in a team is a preferred way to tackle problems. For instance, games that have children playing in teams such as the hot or cold game for younger children or scavenger hunt for older children are excellent choices to introduce cooperation to children. The focus on these games is encouraging children to work with each other to find the missing object.
Honesty games
One of the fundamental principles that we want to teach to children is that it is wrong to lie and that sharing the truth will only open them doors in the future. Honesty can be promoted through games such as the button game. In this game the players are competing to try and find out which of the players is hiding a button. The children are encouraged to uncover the liar. Similar games for older children are based on finding out the liar within the group or the person that might not be sharing the truth.
Patience games
More cognitive demanding games such as chess and Sudoku can teach children consistency, perseverance and patience. These games require children a higher level of concentration and the merits from the effort are only acquired after a longer period of time. It can teach them that the right behavior is to be persistent and to wait for the reward as opposed to looking for the easy solution or the best way out. Since these are highly individualistic games it can also open them to new methods of learning right and wrong from a different perspective.
Perseverance games
Sometimes for a child to learn what is right they need to learn first what is wrong. The popular matching game where children have to match two identical cards that are placed upside down is an excellent example of learning what is right after trial and error. Equally, classroom activities that ask children to guess the right answer from a serious of options allows them to judge from the options and slowly bet for the right answer. Teachers can use guessing games that promote self-discovery instead of instructing the correct answer form the start.
Teaching children the difference between right and wrong starts from introducing them to universal principles such as honesty, cooperation, patience and perseverance. Creating games that are based on these principles will precipitate quality educational experiences.
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