Preschool Thru Mid-Elementary Gameschool Board Games

It’s family game season in our home! As the days have grown short and cold, we’ve been pulling out lots of games to occupy our minds and time! Here are the favorites we’ve enjoyed over the past few years in the preschool and early elementary years… my boys are now in kindergarten and 2nd grade.

When we began introducing games, we were working primarily on

taking turns
winning and losing graciously
flexible thinking
helpfulness in setting up/cleaning up

Truthfully, we’re still working on these skills! 😉

Cooperative Games – for youngers

Our first favorite games were cooperative games. These allowed us to work on the basics of game play without the competition aspect that can be so tough for little ones. Embedded in the games in this section are many other educational concepts, so they’re wonderful additions to the game closet.

Geography Games

There are so many fun geography games out there– these have been wonderful for my motivated 1st grader, and are fun up through elementary age+.

Math Games

We primarily play the math games from Right Start Math (curriculum review here). On Fridays we have “gameschool day”– we play the games I’ve been making note of during the week to practice the skills we’ve been working on. My kids love the games included (my post about gameschool with math card games here). But, we also have a handful of additional board games for math:

Battleship Battleship teaches grids/graphs/columns/rows.

Election Night is also a geography game! Win-win 🙂

Literacy

I’ve found it more challenging to find games that are specifically for early readers. I’ve listed a few below. However, I’ve found that we can use many basic games in our game closet as literacy games to practice sight words/phonograms– Don’t Crack The Ice, Pop the Pig, even CandyLand…. simply require players to read a word card/phonogram before taking their turn. 🙂

We’ve also enjoyed the basic file folder games from All About Reading. You can find those here (free with email signup). For prereaders (learning letter sounds), we enjoy the Ziggy Reading Games supplement from All About Reading, and older readers can easily tag along.