The Craftiest Workshop

I spent a few days babysitting for a family with four kids a couple weeks ago. The eldest, a five year old, enjoys playing games. We played a deck building Harry Potter game which I really enjoyed. He can’t read the text but knows what the symbols mean and memorizes what cards do, so much so that I rarely had to help him.

It shouldn’t have surprised me when he took out a chess board and accurately placed all the pieces. I asked him if he knew how to move each piece. His answer was, “yeah I know, but I just want to play my own game with them.” He started to engage with the pieces, doing his own verbal play by play of the battle being waged. A few minutes later he moved one of the knights in an accurate chess move and said, “see, this is how the horse moves.”

In that moment, I was reminded that everyone needs an invitation to play. For kids, it often tends to be imaginative play; even though they might know the rules they are choosing to make up their own. For us adults, we also need a visual incentive at times to feel motivated to engage in an activity.

I was looking at our board game pantry. The one wall of cubbies with board games, each with their own colourful illustrated box. The game designers have done that to encourage people to want to go that one step farther and buy and open the box. Some of our more basic games like scrabble, rummy cube and dominoes are in boring plain boxes. I decided to remove the pieces from the boxes and place them on display on the opposite countertop.

This is a very large pickle jar now housing coloured twelves dominoes.

The idea snowballed a bit and I got to thinking about what else could I display in jars that was game related.

We have lots of dice. These are a mix of my husband’s Dungeon and Dragons dice and extra dice we have collected over the years. You can see a die 30 all the way down to a die 4 in there. Seeing the dice makes me want to play games we have that focus on dice like Kerfuffle, Dicecapades, Favour of the Pharoah, Roll Player or Kingsburg.

I have a collection of marbles. I played marbles at recess as a child. Our kids went through a phase where they spent their allowances to buy different coloured marbles and played with them. My father in-law gave me some of his marbles. Some the size of golf balls and others the size of a pea. I am reminded of spending hours playing aggravation as a child moving my colour of marble around the board.

We are pretty responsible with game parts and pieces but over the years there has been games or puzzles that have lost pieces, leaving the game unplayable. Instead of tossing out the remaining pieces, I have kept a baggie of pieces from over the years. Now, those pieces are in a jar. A stray cheese piece from Mousetrap (how I hated that game), a Scooby Doo checkers piece (a favourite character of our kids) and a broken Dollar sign playing piece from Pay Day…just to name a few.

Thinking of it from an early childhood education point of view, there are a number of different things that pass through my mind as I look at the jars and their contents.

I see numbers and symbols that represent numbers. Having numbers visible for kids to see over and over helps them learn them. One step farther, if they removed them from a jar to play with, they start counting.

I see letters. Again a way to learn letters and how those letters can go together to form words. There is one jar with Scrabble and Keyword letter tiles.

I see colours. Colour identification, colour grouping, patterning and forming a rainbow could all be done with gaming pieces.

I see shapes. Rectangles, circles, squares, cubes.

I see 3D art pieces. A building could be constructed with dominos or a mosaic laid out in marbles.

As an adult I see memories of playing these games as a child with my family or with my own children. The “sorter” in me would enjoy dumping out the marbles and sorting them into colours; perhaps I will do that one day as a a calming activity.

I see game pieces and it really does put me in the mood to play a game. It also has inspired me to think about other gaming related things I could build or wood-burn to add to our gaming decor. I imagine some of those decor items will be highlighted in future posts.

Seeing the playing pieces on display also warms my heart and makes me smile.
That is what things you decorate your own home with should do for you.