Games We Play

I walked into the Pre-K classroom of my church the other day; it was the beginning of second service, when there are usually something like forty kids in the class, and there were only two in there.  It was really close to the beginning of the service, but I was still a little surprised.  I ignored the ferns hanging from the ceiling and the front end of a Jeep parked onstage (I had taught in that room the week before so it was nothing new to me) and sat down with the two kids.  They were playing this board game called Cross-Over or something.  It was some kind of math game, but these kids can’t even read yet.   

 

Extremely rough (hence the eye-patch and scars) likeness.

The one kid, Cole, who was probably three and looked a heck of a lot like my older cousin had at that age, asked my name and if I wanted to play with them; I said I’m Alex, and sure.  Cole showed me how to play; he catapulted this translucent blue die into the board so hard I thought it might explode, but it didn’t.  He looked around for a little and then pulled down a few numbers – 6, 7, and 8 – on my side of the board (it was a square board with ten movable number pegs on each side) and said it was my turn.  I threw the die at the board as hard as I could, but it still didn’t blow up.  I rolled a 5 and he started looking.  “Where is that one?” he asked as though he really knew the rules to a game like this.  Finally, he pulled down the 9 and 10 on the side where no one was sitting and said I’d gotten a 12.  Now that I think about it, he was probably just copying behaviors from his parents, but he sure had me convinced. We played a few more rounds – never apparently keeping score and ending the game when all four sets of ten pegs were pulled down – and I was convinced that we were doing something right.  The second kid – a girl named Ava whose brown hair was short but with bangs that neatly covered her eyes – seemed to agree with everything Cole had to say, but I’m not sure she was really paying attention.  She mostly wanted to pull number pegs down and say “you got 20!” she certainly seemed to like the game.

 There are 10 ninjas in this picture.

After the large group lesson someone else got ahold of the board, a somewhat older – something like 4 and a half – girl named Macy.  She plunked the board down on a grey plastic school table and said I should play.  Her version was a little… lacking, shall we say.  She still tossed the die at the board with intent to kill in her tiny hand – but then she only turned down one wooden peg, the 10, and then with each throw, she turned down one more, six, eight, seven, six, and so on.  For some reason, she always read the 9 as a 6, but never the 6 as a 9. 

So there you go – a three-year-old with a mind for creating his own complex board game and a four-and-a-half-year-old who thinks counting down from 10 is the same as keeping score.  On the same game board, they may just create some beautiful bridge of understanding.  Or kill each other with dice. 

In this pic, there is only one ninja. I think.