What game did you want to play when 3yrd old?

August 9, 2006 12:05 AM

Are there memory / brain games I should play with my three year old?

I have a toddler who is fascinated by logic, loves imaginative stories, and thinks daddy is ridiculous. (Wow, I sure love that third one.) Are there any specifically non-TV, non-Internet games I can play with her to stimulate her brain towards the independent, (shamelessly imaginative) thinking which I am so entralled with? Bonus points for anything that teaches Latin language or basic Calculus in the process (just kidding!)

Conventional widsom INCLUDED, what is your favorite mental or physical game to play with your toddler?

posted by crazyray to sports, hobbies, & recreation (13 comments total)

With my toddlers I played games like this:

Your turn: I went to the shop and I bought a reel of cotton.
Her turn: I went to the shop and I bought a reel of cotton and a carton of milk.
etc.

If her language skills aren't up to that, send complex messages to mummy. Would you please go and tell mummy that I think she is the most intelligent and beautiful woman in the world. The phrase gets distorted which is fun and she gets practice at bigger words.

Pick one word and make a sentence (my kids like the gorier the better: explosion, blood, teddybears). Add degree of difficulty by adding extra unrelated words. It's oral, not written, so you don't need spelling skills.

When shopping, count the tins of food that go in, get her to pick out the fruit etc.

Yes/No game. One person asks the questions and the other must answer without saying yes or no.
Her: Did you have fun today?
You: I might have.

Cut a bunch of pictures out of magazines, together. Have her paste them into a book, and tell you the story that you write beneath the cuttings.

How's that?
posted by b33j at 12:20 AM on August 9, 2006 [2 favorites]

I used to do role-playing with my grandmother. Your basic "cowboys and indians" or "pirates and sailors" or "spacemen and monsters" stuff, but ... different. We played "EPA versus the polluters" or "Grave Robbers in Egypt" (she was an egyptologist). So our games had elements of action/adventure to them, but she managed to give me some basic lessons in science (How do you measure the purity of water? What impact does society have on the world we live in?) and history (What societies existed before our own? What does our society have in common with them, and in what ways are we completely different?)

She was officially one of those Cool Grannies. I think those games went from when I was really young - maybe your daughter's age - to late elementary or early middle school. To be honest, they didn't end until I left for college; we just gradually phased out the pretend aspects and started talking about those same issues - history, politics, social justice, and so on - in the Real World.

Fond memories there. Thanks for asking!
posted by spaceman_spiff at 12:24 AM on August 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

oh, i used a torch and a beach ball to explain about day and night.

We did the water cycle in the bathtub, you know, water rains on the mountains (the kid) and runs down into the sea, where it evaporates (with the assistance of a cup) and rains on the mountains again.

Playdough - find a recipe somewhere and let her help make it. Colour it and show that putting blue and red food dye makes purple. And then make crazy wonderful things.

We used to go for walks and find things like caterpillars, and leaves that held together in a way to make rain run in.

Cardboard box = every vehicle known to mankind. Dress it up maybe by drawing dials and symbols. Make it fun by dragging it around the yard. (My daughter used to yell "faster!" while my son always said "Slower!") Make up a story - she's in a spaceship visiting the planet thrangle where the aliens all look like you. Do not play Jeff Wayne's war of the worlds.

Have instrumental music playing and make up stories together about what it might mean, dependant on the tempo and mood.

Yep, good times.
posted by b33j at 12:44 AM on August 9, 2006

As far as organised games, we have heaps of jigsaw puzzles, dominoes (a Toy Story themed set with pictures of the characters in place of the dots, as well as the dotted sort), picture cards for playing Snap and Go Fish, a Memory game -- that one's tricky for my 3.5 year old son, though -- a colour-matching game where one card has a picture of an object and the matching card has the specific colours in that picture, and an opposites card game where you match opposites or related objects (rain and sun, socks and shoes, etc). Most of these games were given to us and don't leave much scope for imagination, but it's fun to see what direction a preschooler will take the game in if you don't explain the rules to them.

You could probably make up games based on these concepts, or work together to create your own cards for similar games.

We cut up magazine pictures to make jigsaw puzzles, do a lot of painting/Playdough/paper mache stuff together. We sit down and go through photos and make up stories about what's happening in them, who the people are, why they are smiling. We listen to music and he tells me whether the music is happy or sad, what's happening in the music. We sing a lot of songs, too, and make up songs of our own about whatever the hot topic may be: Dad's on an aeroplane; I don't like kindergarten; My toothbrush is cool; weird stuff.

My son is really into jumping on stuff at the moment. Every now and then when it's raining I drag a mattress into the living room and let him bounce the afternoon away, or pile every cushion and pillow in the house into the tallest mountain possible and then smash it down, or build a blanket fort over the kitchen table or clothes-drying rack, then "furnish" it and move in.

We'll go to reasonable lengths to answer our son's questions. The other day he wanted to know whether eggs bounce or break when you drop them, so we gave him three eggs to test on the driveway. I have a neighbour who willingly lets her preschooler daughter experiment with ingredients in the kitchen. We once ate a chocolate cake that looked like fudge brownies but tasted like baking soda. :)

Have you shown your daughter cool stuff like mixing vinegar and baking soda, or Mentos in Pepsi or whatever it is?
posted by tracicle at 12:46 AM on August 9, 2006

My dad played lego with me from a very early age (maybe I was 2?3? the earliest actual memory I have of that is about age 4). He made really cool things with gears and moving parts that fascinated me.

This may sound so obvious as to be implicit in your question, but being read to as a child has had a massive impact on how I approach the world - it's informed my career and my approach to the world. Both my brother and I had memorised books (that had been read to us over and over again) before we could even read. Cannot extol the virtues of reading enough.
posted by prettypretty at 12:49 AM on August 9, 2006

I was started on arithmetic flash-cards about that age (perhaps a little older?) - a pile of cards with low numbers on (1 to 5 to start with), and a pile of cards with operators (+ and -).
Turn over a number, then an operator, then a number - and do the sum.

Another one was a memory game (probably just called "pairs" or something) - a set of cards with pairs of pictures, placed face down in a grid.
Turn one face up, then another. If they match, remove them.
If they don't match, turn them both face down, and try again. The trick is to remember where the matching cards are. This can be timed, or the number of moves can be counted.
posted by Chunder at 1:50 AM on August 9, 2006

An exhaustive list of Improv Games can be found here, some of which may spark something interesting you can adapt for a young child.

Free assocaition is always fun, you just pick a word, she says the first thing that comes to her mind related to that, you respond, etc, etc.
posted by sophist at 2:58 AM on August 9, 2006

Since you're so concerned about her intellectual development I'm sure you read to her. But if you don't there are several good books out there that lend themselves to questions such as, "Why did he do that?" and "What will happen next?" to make a sort of mental game out of it. The "Don't Let Pigeon..." series also lets the child participate in the story by shouting out.

Have fun!
posted by christinetheslp at 7:39 AM on August 9, 2006

A freelance game-designer friend of mine recently wrote some praise about this line of young childrens' games (blatant one-step-removed-from-self link :) ). By way of comparison, his own spawn's circa 3.5 now.
posted by Drastic at 7:47 AM on August 9, 2006

My daughter and I used to play "the letter game." One of us would think of a word, and tell the other what letter the word started with. The other person would have to guess the word. Sure, it sounds like it would be really hard, since there are so many possible choices. But really, a 3yo doesn't have that large a vocabulary. And usually she gave away the word by unconsciously looking at something in her bedroom. (We usually played after reading a bedtime story.) I always tried to choose words that referenced something she had done that day. We usually allowed clues, like "it's something in your room" or "it's a person."

A variation, when she got older, was "the ending letter game." One person would say a word out loud. The other would have to come up with a word that started with the ending letter of the previous word. So if one person said "firetruck", the other would have to come up with a word that started with K (say "kite") then the other would have to think of an "E" word, and so on. Words couldn't be repeated.

Since we played these almost EVERY NIGHT until she was about 9 (!), I really feel these two games are one of the reasons my daughter has a large vocabulary, and has a pretty well-developed ability to picture things in her head and communicate them to others.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 8:24 AM on August 9, 2006

I learned to read when I was three -- according to my mother, I learned by watching The Electric Company. You say non-TV, so probably renting the newly released Electric Company DVDs is out. However, if you've seen the show and if you recall, their style was to play with words, to make the spelling, sounding out, and comprehension of reading written words a game. They pointed out how many words could be made from one simply by changing one letter, how some things that are spelled similarly are pronounced differently, et cetera. I second the notion that reading to your kid is probably the most important thing you can do, but perhaps you can deviate from the plain ol' reading aloud and make the actual reading process interactive -- a reading with your child, rather than a reading to.

As well, Memory (the one with the matching cards) was a favorite game for a long, long time. Actually, I still enjoy it.

Good luck! Kids are amazing.
posted by penchant at 8:27 AM on August 9, 2006

oh man i LOVED the 'ending letter' game.. when i played it we had categories (usually animals since thats what i was obsessed with as a child).

ive recently been looking into Role Playing Games for children, there are a ton of great ones out there and some for very small children. everything from being a backyard rabbit solving mysteries to a dumbed down version of Dungeons and Dragons. Ive also heard about some educational RPGs that involve more educational lessons.

more than anything just talk to your kids, i see way too many small children that have no conversational skills what so ever.
posted by trishthedish at 9:28 AM on August 9, 2006

If your kid is smart (as she seems to be by your description), three is not too young to start teaching her to read. My dad started when I was three. He used flashcards and then those simple Dick-and-Jane type books (althought I am not sure if they were actually that series). I have a vague memory of him going "M-O-M spells...mom!"

One series of books that the kids I babysit love is called Brand New Readers. The stories are very cute and always have a funny ending (more entertaining than "Run Jane Run").
posted by radioamy at 6:32 PM on August 9, 2006