Here's a quick distraction to get fidgety kids through boring events like car rides, restaurant waits and, alas, church services. It's quiet, it's attention-grabbing, and it can expand to fill as much time as you need -- a perfect item for the "bag of tricks" that every parent of behavior-challenged kids needs to have.
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: As much as you need
Here's How:
- Make a grid of dots on a piece of paper. Like this.
- Have your child connect two of the dots, across or down (but not diagonally).
- Now you connect two of the dots.
- Keep taking turns until a square is formed.
- The person who completes the square gets to put his or her initial in it, and gets another turn.
- Keep taking turns, connecting dots and completing squares, until all the dots on the grid are connected.
- Count up each player's initials on the grid. The one with the most squares wins.
Tips:
- It's easy enough to just fill a scrap of paper or the back of a receipt with dots to play this game, but you can also print out a bunch of grids in a compact format at pocketmod.com -- just select the "dots" page for all pages of your mini-booklet.
- Encourage your child use a little strategy by avoiding putting the third line on a box (enabling you to capture it by adding the fourth line). That doesn't mean you can't slip and "accidentally" forget that strategy yourself, giving your child a small victory.
- Expand the number of dots in your grid to accommodate the amount of time you need to fill; limit it by the amount of attention your child can sustain. When in doubt, go with the latter. Better to play a couple of games than to have interest run out in the middle of one.
- For a demonstration of how this game works, try this version against the computer.
What You Need:
- Piece of paper
- Pen or pencil
