Board games can offer a wealth of benefits for children on the autism spectrum
They can help them to focus on their strengths, share their accomplishments, and connect with family and friends. Board games can even prepare them for a potential working future in adulthood.
If you’re a parent of a child on the autism spectrum, you, your child, and your entire family can benefit from board game play.
Advantages of Board Games
- Board Games Have Set, Predictable Rules. Actions are repeated, though perhaps with variations, in each turn. This aspect of routine and predictability is a motivator for children to repeat game play. Our educational packs come with 3 board games, repeating these actions and rules.
- Board Games Players Learn Patience, Awareness of Others. Games involve turn-taking, but most games do not require players to make eye contact, as the board is the focus of the game. Thus, children learn to wait to repeat their turn and begin to pay attention to others’ actions and comments in the interim.
- Board Games are Primarily Visual, Spatial, and Tactile. Many children with autism are visual learners. Board games allow them to use their visual strengths, to analyse a situation, compare options, and determine a result. Children with autism may be able to see visual details quickly and remember them. They may be able to visualise spatial relationships or use visual-spatial memory to compare options for movement of pieces. This often places children with these strengths at an advantage.
- Board Games Can Help Develop Emotional and Social Skills. If games are carefully selected to build on children’s interests and abilities, they can provide a framework to help children develop patience, tolerance for ambiguity, ability to recognise and regulate emotions, and a desire and ability to interact with others. Building emotional and social foundations will help children progress in all areas: developmental domains, academic content areas, and life skills.
Children with autism also find themselves having a real passion for certain things. Trains, planes and vehicles to name a few. Autistic children will therefore LOVE some of our designs. Make sure you let them play with real toy trains or cars to really bring the board games to life.
HAVE A LOOK AT OUR EDUCATIONAL BOARD GAMES
