The summer holiday is the perfect time to stop rushing around and start spending quality time with my own children. When we get bored after the first week and/or the weather takes a turn for the worse, we start playing games. Card games are simple and a deck of fits easily into luggage if you are travelling, but so does Pass the Pigs!
Pass the Pigs is a family favourite and has many develpmental benefits when playing the game with children. It helps with maths, but also with learning resilience and perseverance.
The aim of the game is to score the most points by rolling a pair of pigs. Your score is calculated depending on the position the pigs land in. The first educational benefit is simple addition. The children need to add up the score of the two pigs they have rolled, then they must add it to their total score. It’s a good bit of mental addition practice. But that’s not the best bit.
The best bit is the losing. As you play the game you accrue points, but you can also lose your points. All of them. If your two pigs are touching (making bacon) or you roll a double sider with one dot up and one dot down, your score goes back to zero. What I’ve found to be particularly valuable are the converstations I’ve been having with the children when they do lose their points.
To start with there were a few tantrums and then not wanting to play EVER AGAIN! Then they would play if the were in a team with an adult. This gave us the opportunity to model our reactions to losing points. It’s ok to be disappionted. But we’re trying to teach proportional responses. Eventually they were happy to play on their own, with/against the rest of the family. Great fun ensuses. WARNING – avoid playing the game if your small child is too tired, it’s easy to go back to square one!
There is immense pleasure to be found in rolling a leaning jowler or a double razorback. But that pleasure is heightened by the jeopardy involved. I like the fact that you can be winning the whole way through the game, only to lose all of your points at the last moment. Equally, you can be floundering in single figures and surprisingly be the last player with any points.
