Games as a Teaching Tool

Recently I have fallen in love with board games. Every weekend, our family has friends over, and we always try to play games. It's the highlight of the week. But, since I'm a teacher, I find that I always look for an "educational" twist to the game. I never have to search hard; there always seems to be something "educational" in every game.

In high school, I wouldn't feel right using games as a teaching tool. I think students (or parents) would see the exercise as a waste of time, or childish, or whatever. In fact, once, when I tutored a student, the parent was very dissapointed with the teachers, as the students were "playing games in class instead of learning math". High school is supposed to be serious, none of that Micky Mouse game playing. It's true, I never used (as of yet) games in my high school classes. There just doesn't seem to be enough time.

When I taught junior high, though, very often I introduced games into my teaching routine. They always had to have a purpose, a "learning objective", but that wasn't hard to do (as I said, most games are very educational). The students loved these game days, and I know they learned from them, even if it wasn't right on topic. The students learned because it was "active" learning - when playing a game, the students need to participate, think, problem solve, etc - in other words, actively learn.

As I set this as a goal at the beginning of the year (to use games as part of my teaching) I really tried hard to find appropriate active learning exercises each week. However, I wasted a lot of time searching for appropriate games / activities to correspond to the curriculum. It was not that simple. The game had to be relevant, fun, useful, fresh, at the appropiate level. Some days, I searched and searched, asked all my friends, talked to my husband, and still had nothing. But the weeks that I found the perfect match - those were the memerable teaching moments (never forgotten by me or my students).

I think it would be useful to have some sort of list or bank of games or other similar activities, easily accessible for all teachers - this would save us time and allow our students to take advantage of this great learning tool - GAMES.