Make Family Game Night Educational With These 9 Board Games

If your kids are home for the rest of the school year and you're feeling less than confident about educating them yourself, consider playing board games with some kind of learning tied in to get you started. Educational board games are a great way to bond with your family while your kids practice skills and develop their knowledge.

Board games reinforce social skills like teamwork and taking turns. Moving the pieces promotes good hand-eye coordination, but that's not all. When young children count spaces, they are practicing what is called one-to-one correspondence, a key math skill. Many games also involve color recognition or memorizing a sequence of steps. When children have to form a mental strategy, they are developing the frontal lobes in their brain, which are used for reasoning.

In my home, we have a family game night once per week that we all look forward to. Now that our state has a shelter-in-place order, we have been playing board games a few times per week to help us pass the time indoors. The current crisis has added a pretty significant amount of stress to our lives, and our daughter picks up on that. Sitting together at the table to play a game reduces anxiety for us all. I choose educational board games so that while we're having fun interacting together, we are also reinforcing learning for our daughter.