The Essence of a game is that is involves actions undertaken for the purpose of pleasure. But they also have a serious purpose. They can help us to practise skills and to develop concepts and strategies. In other words, games are a fun way to learn!

This is why games play such an important part of lessons at Brain Train. Ultimately, we want children acquire a love for learning. The comment we hear most often from parents and that gives us the greatest pride and pleasure is… ‘he’s learning so much and I can’t believe how much he loves coming here for lessons!”

So here’s a couple of games for you to try and home. These games can involve any number of players and are suitable for ages 7 and above.

Word Pyramids
This is great for reading, spelling and vocabulary development. Players start with on letter and build a pyramid from the top to the bottom. They add a letter at each step like this:

The player that builds the highest pyramid wins the game. Note that letters can be rearranged, as long as each previous letter and one new letter are used each time.

Secret Number
This game encourages logical deduction and develops numerical understanding and mathematical vocabulary. One player volunteers to think of a secret number between 0 and 100. The rest of the group have 10 questions to try to discover the secret number. The child with the secret number can only answer with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. A first question might be something like ‘Can the number be divided exactly by 5?’ A handy hint is to ask your child to write the secret number down on a piece of paper to avoid the temptation to change his/her mind during the game (it has been known)!