The Best Game Ever

A few days ago, I wrote about how we had been assembling our new furniture at the workbench. Among the items we worked on were several square tables. Naturally, the kids wanted to grab some chairs and sit around the first one we completed.

As we sat there looking at one another, I asked, "What should we do with our new table."

"Play a game!"

I picked up a stick from the ground and put it in the center of our table. I said, "Here's a game."

The children sat for a moment looking at the stick, then one of them reached out and spun it. She said, "Whoever it points at has to sing a song."

Two boys started singing. She said, "No, no, you're the only singer," pointing at one of the boys.

The other boy objected, "But it's pointing at me."

That's when they realized that the spinner-stick, in fact, had two ends, each pointing to a different player, so they decided it was a "two singer" game. After some discussion over which song to sing, they chose the alphabet song.

When they were done, someone said, "We should play an A-B-C game." Everyone agreed, then sat looking at one another as it sunk in that there needed to be more to make it a game. 

"I know! Teacher Tom will say a letter and if it's your letter, you grab the stick." Everyone knows that "your letter" means the letter at the beginning of your first name. We played a few rounds of this, with me sometimes tossing out letters that belonged to none of them, which lead to us trying to figure out which one of our classmates, were they sitting with us, would be grabbing the stick. Then we expanded the definition of "your letter" to mean any letter found in your name. After awhile, the children just took over shouting out their own letters using a turn-taking system that was not transparent to me, but seemed to satisfy them all.

I walked away, leaving them to it. It must have been a good half hour later that I was back in the area. The game had become rowdy, with lots of stick grabbing and laughing. I heard one of them say, "This is the best game ever!"

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