Serious Play: for kids who are serious about learning and having fun
At the British Council, we are very serious about playing games.
Why?
- Games are an excellent platform for learning at any age, but especially for children and teenagers.
- Playing games can help increase your child or teenager’s willingness and motivation to engage in learning English, whilst building their confidence across all four skills - reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
- The importance of playing games is often overlooked in favour of more traditional types of learning. However, many educators believe that play should be regarded as serious learning. It helps children develop cognitive skills and abilities that are essential for future success, including learning a language. This combination of fun and challenge makes games powerful educational tools.
Playing games in or outside the classroom, is a fantastic way for children of all ages to improve their language skills in a ‘real-life’ situation.
What is ‘real-life’ for a child/teenager?
Children and teenagers spend a lot of quality time playing at home by themselves or with friends and family. If just some of that time was engaged in playing games in English – they would get the added benefit of practising language skills whilst feeling relaxed and having fun. We will teach your child and you how to incorporate English learning into game time.
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Primary Courses Kids aged 5-12
Learn • Plan • Create • Play
Over this fun-packed weeklong course, your child will create their own ‘game box’, full of English games that they have created themselves. They will have learnt how to play these educational and fun games and can continue to play at home with family and friends - even after the course has finished.
As part of the course your child will receive an engaging reading book. They will be motivated to read for a real purpose, as they use their fiction/non-fiction book as a source of information to create their games. These readers have been carefully chosen according to your child’s age and level of English proficiency and will challenge and engage even the most reluctant of readers. Your child will learn how to skim and scan a text, identify key facts, and improve their writing skills by creating questions, riddles, definitions, and other content for their games. The games will in turn, help reinforce what they have learned and help to review new language and concepts.
Course Outline
‘Building Block Challenge’
Each day will start with a ‘building block challenge’, where your child will practice letter and word formation, expand their vocabulary, and improve their ability to express their ideas more clearly as they become make friends with their classmates and start working as a team.
Creating a Board Game
Over the week, your child will design and create their own board game that they can take home on the last day. The content of the board game will be based on the theme of their book which they read across the week. Playing board games helps build literary skills in children, such as letter identification, spelling, and vocabulary. They also become much more adept at communication with others as they need to use a variety of functional language expressions to play successfully in a group setting.
Final day ‘Invite a Parent’ event and free recorded workshop
In the last half hour of every course, parents are invited to see what their child has accomplished over the week. Also, on the last day of the course, you will receive a recorded workshop which will walk you through each of the games your child has played during the course and show you how to easily set these activities up at home. This recorded workshop includes a variety of ways to play each game and useful language that you can encourage your child to use as they play as well as simple instructions to set up each game.