Brain Boosters

By the Primary School Learning Support Department

School is where we learn new skills while developing our selfconfidence. But home can also be a valuable place to practise and improve many techniques to make learning easier. From our combined team of Support for Learning teachers, Enrichment Specialists and our Speech and Language Therapist, we have gathered some of our favourite ways to exercise those important brain processes we use to be successful at school. We hope you find one or two new activities your family enjoys trying at home. This article will be shared as a two-part series – look out for the second installment in the Term 2 Magazine!

Grace Smith: Supporting Emotional Regulation

The following games support emotional regulation, which helps students learn self-awareness and understand their feelings better. Some of the games you have in your cupboards can be adapted very easily to support and teach a deeper understanding of emotions.

Connect Four is a great game for turn-taking and strategy. With a simple adaptation, it can also be used to support emotional regulation. Place different emotion stickers on the red and yellow chips. When a player picks up a piece to place it, they must share a time that they have felt that emotion. This can help identify emotions and talk through an appropriate coping strategy to deal with it.

Twister can also be adapted in a similar way. Use a sharpie pen to add emotions to the Twister mat. When playing, add in the emotions to the player’s move. “Look, you have just moved your hand onto the happy face. I wonder if you can show me that facial expression.”

Lots of children enjoy playing with cars. You could focus on emotions when playing by making an emotion car park. Mark out the parking spaces for each car and identify the emotion for each spot. When your child parks the cars, encourage them to talk about the space they have chosen for each car and how that car may feel and why. Use prompts such as “I wonder…” to gently ask questions. A lot of games you have at home will support your child’s learning and understanding of their own, and other people’s emotions. Keep it gentle and don’t force the conversation if they are not interested. They may take time to notice the emotion pictures. Have fun with it!

Michael Plews: Strategising with Abstract Games

There are lots of fun and easily-learned variations on ‘all in a row’ games like tic-tac-toe that are screen-free and fun for all ages! These are great for problem-solving, thinking ahead, pattern-spotting, learning strategies and creating counter-strategies. Also, for turn-taking, kind and respectful social interaction and following rules. The games are quite short in length, which means you can fit in one or two whenever you have a spare minute. No one gets too frustrated by a loss as there’s always an opportunity to start over and learn from what happened last time! Look online for games such as Achi, Tapatan and Dara.

Tanya Peake-Hutchins: Writing for Purpose

Writing is a great way for a student to pull events, emotions and facts from memory and recombine them into new scenarios and characters. There are many prompts available to stimulate students into being creative writers and learn to write for pleasure. By giving picture prompts or real-life reasons to write, students can also write with a sense of purpose. There are also opportunities within school to write outside of the classroom and represent Bangkok Patana in literary competitions and the Patana News is always ready to receive writing from students.

Heather Rising: Exercising Auditory Memory

Auditory memory is particularly important in school. Adults often give new information orally and throughout the day, students must listen to, and follow, multi-step instructions. There are some great games to practise listening skills while increasing the amount of information held in our working memory.

Creating and telling a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story during long trips was a favourite in my house. Players must decide the order they play, first, second, etc. As each player takes their turn, they become the Story Master and make decisions on what will happen. Player 1 starts by describing a short beginning to a story, setting the scene and perhaps adding one additional character. Then Player 1 offers two choices, such as: Would you like to go through the red door or go down the stairs? Player 2 picks one of the choices, like going down the stairs, and explains what happens next. At the end of their turn, Player 2 must offer two choices for the next player. If necessary, when adult players have their turn, they can help keep the game exciting by introducing twists or new ideas to keep things flowing. Some stories can continue over several days or only last a few minutes. You can set some rules to keep things fair like adding time limits and not allowing players to injure or hurt a character.

Rebecca Fricsay: Practicing Cognitive Development

Playing games with LEGO pieces can help a child’s cognitive development and can help them with following instructions, working out sequence and understanding quantity and patterns. It can also help children to develop their mathematical skills and spatial awareness and can encourage them to come up with new ideas and improve their problem-solving skills. These are a few ideas that you can try at home with your child:

Find the Missing Item

This is a really simple game you can play anywhere with your child, as long as you have a few LEGO pieces with you. Put a few items in front of your child and tell them to memorize what they see. Ask them to close their eyes while you take an item away and see if they can guess which one is missing once they open their eyes. To make it more challenging you can add more LEGO pieces, or re-order the pieces and guess where they were before.

Where is the brick?

You can play this game with three plastic cups and a LEGO brick. You place a LEGO piece under one of the cups and move them around while your child watches and tries to follow where the brick will end up. This challenge will train your child’s visual memory and fine motor skills. You can make this more difficult for older children using more cups and even a few different coloured bricks.

Tell Me a Story

Tell your child a simple story and then ask them to tell the same story back to you, using LEGO people or animals. This game helps your child understand sequences of actions in a story but can also be used to talk about sequences of actions that you do throughout the day.

Spot the Difference

Make two similar LEGO builds but change one or two things on the second one. Take the first one away and see if your child can remember the differences. To make this more challenging you can change more things and use a larger number of bricks.

Remember the Sequence

Build a tower out of three different coloured LEGO bricks and ask your child to memorize the order of the colour sequence, then let them rebuild the tower. You can make this as complicated as you like, adding many levels and patterns. Add more people to give this game a competitive edge!