It's family game night. You rummage through the board games on your shelf and ask yourself "What game are we going to play tonight?" You may even feel frustrated as you have found it's not always easy to play board games with your child who has speech and or language challenges. It's understandable because for many children who have challenges in communication, whether it is pronouncing specific speech sounds, trouble with listening and following directions, difficulty expressing thoughts in an organized manner, comprehending and/or asking questions, or socially interacting, some board games are just difficult. Maybe the game requires a longer attention span than what your kiddo has to offer. Perhaps listening skills are an area of weakness and your child is not able to understand the game rules and/or directions. Possibly, due to frequent exposure to video games, tablets and other electronic devices the child simply doesn't know how to socially engage when playing a board game.
As an SLP (this means speech-language pathologist) who has an affinity for playing board games with my clients, I have become a game changer and you can too. How do you become a game changer? You play outside of the box. You change the rules. You modify the directions. Sometimes you even throw the rules out the proverbial window! Whatever you need to do to create engagement during the game all the while addressing your child's communication needs. Most important, keep it FUN!!
Today I wanted to provide the following suggestions for a classic game, Guess Who. The object of Guess Who is to be the first player to guess the other player's hidden character. Typically this is accomplished by asking closed ended questions (yes/no) such as "Does your person have brown hair?" Of course there is nothing wrong with the game's original intent and many ideas can be formulated to guess the correct character however, when you are a game changer, you allow yourself to be open to other possibilities. By focusing on your child's communication needs and by making modifications, by deciding to be a game changer, the next time Game Night rolls around, you just may find you are the first one at the table!
5 Ways to Game Change Guess Who:
1. Speech Sounds:
Often the age of the child who is playing Guess Who is 6 years or older. Speech sound errors that may be present which your child is learning to produce could include voiceless and/or voiced "th" (e.g thumb, this), /r/ and /s/. If your child is working on the "th" sound, this game lends itself perfectly to target word of "this". To change up the game, instead of your child asking yes or no questions, your child can make a descriptive statement: “This person wears glasses”, “This person has blonde hair”, “This person does not have a beard”.
Part of being a game changer is to "play outside of the box". A mother of a client of mine did this so well by coming up with the following target question: "Does that person have... (a white hat)." The opponent would then be required to answer yes or no question but with the addition of the "th" word of "they" (e.g. "No they don't" or "Yes they do") This addressed the "th" sound repetitively and this mother was such a rock star that she added in written print for her child to practice her reading skills. "They" also happened to be the child's sight word at that time.
You can address other common speech sound errors of /s/ sound in middle of words such as in person, glasses, mustache or in blends such as "small hat", "smiling". The /r/ sound can be practiced in words such as red hat, red hair, eyebrows, brown eyes, person, beard, hair. You'll be amazed at the words you can think of once you start to think in the game changer way.
2. Listening and Following Directions:
Guess Who can often pose a real challenge for children who have difficulty with listening and following directions. One way to address this is by having you, the adult, provide a statement with two different descriptors such as “This person is a man with a white beard”. Your child would then repeat the statement to practice recalling what you said.
If your child is struggling with auditory memory, you could provide the same kind of statement and then have the child engage in auditory memory techniques such as repeating with you. If your child is visual (many children who have difficulty with auditory skills are strong visually) drawing may be helpful such as drawing a picture of a man with a white beard.
To help with following directions, instruct your child to close the doors of certain characters: “Close the door on all of the men with white beards” or for simplification “close the doors on all the men/boys”. You can keep adding descriptive statements, “Close the doors on all the girls with hats”. You can add negation such as “close the doors on the men that don’t have beards”.
Remember to watch your child's behavior closely and be ready to change, ask your child what may be helpful or if need be, it's okay if your child wants to stop because of frustration. Keep in mind what it's like for you when you learn a new game and then add to that the challenge of not being able to clearly comprehend.
3. Thought Formulation and Expression
Although Guess Who is a game designed around questions, it provides an excellent opportunity to address practicing organizing and formulating expressive statements. Adjectives can be targets such as the child stating “This person has short, black hair” or "This person has a gigantic nose".
To address conjunctions, your child could use statements such as “This person has blonde hair and is wearing glasses” or “This person has blonde hair but is not wearing glasses”.
Sentence construction can be simple or complex so for an older child, to practice conditional concepts, your child could present with statements such as, "Although this person has black hair, she is not wearing glasses" or "This person has short hair, however it is white".
4. Question Formulation
The original intent of Guess Who is to ask questions and then deduct throughout the game who the target person is based on player’s responses of yes and no. In order to do so, the question often contains helping verbs of "is" and "does". Quite often children who have grammar challenges struggle with asking these type of questions (e.g. Does your person have blonde hair? or Is your person wearing a hat?”). If your child is reading, write the question down, highlighting the helping verb. Then have your child read the question. You can also have the common question written with a fill in blank format “Does your person have _______”.
5. Social Interaction
When playing Guess Who, you must socialize with your opponent. There is no rolling of dice or spinning a spinner. There are no buttons to push or joystick to move. In order to play the game, you must be social by asking and answering questions. When engaged in this game, social skills of turn taking, eye contact, talking to each other, listening, waiting your turn and practicing sportsmanship are all social skills involved. Some suggestions to address these skills include drawing a picture of an eye for your child to refer to as a visual reminder for eye contact; passing a bingo chip, coin or some kind of token to the player when it is that player's turn to assist with turn taking and having a list of "good sport" rules nearby to encourage appropriate behavior with the opponent, when game is won or lost.
Hopefully these gave you some ideas of how to modify a common board game to meet your child's communication needs. If you think you like the idea of playing outside of the box and would like to learn how to change more games, I will be posting new game changing ideas in the near future so stay tuned.
If you have any game changes you would like for me to discuss, please reach out to me and let me know. I'd love to hear from you!
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