5 Cooperation Games to Teach Children Valuable Social Skills

5 Cooperation Games to Teach Children Valuable Social Skills

If you’ve got young children, you need to teach them to cooperate with other young children.

Kids aren’t born with the ability to play or work nicely with other people, it’s a skill that has to be learned. Your job, as the parent or teacher, is to instill these skills in them at a young age so that they can make it through things like daycare and school. An uncooperative child is a difficult child.

One of the best ways to teach cooperation is through games. In this post, we’re going to give you 5 cooperation games that you can try out with your kids so that they can become cooperating members of society.

1. Team Hide and Seek

Hide and seek is a classic cooperation game that kids of all ages can play. You can add an extra wrinkle by playing it in teams. Team A can do the hiding, while team B attempts to find them.

Once all of team A is found, you can flip it and have team B do the hiding. It’s fun for hours and the kids will learn to cooperate in order to find the hiders.

2. Mystery Solving

Putting brains together to solve a mystery is a great way to learn how to cooperate to achieve a common goal. The escape room craze has captured this essence and made it available to groups of adults, kids, or a mixture of both.

Take your kids to a child-themed escape room and see if they can work together to solve the mystery.

3. Parachute

Another classic classroom game is the parachute game. In this, the entire group circles around a light sheet or blanket, holding it up off the ground. Then, someone throws a ball onto the chute and the kids flick it up over and over.

The goal is to keep the ball bouncing off of the surface of the sheet without it falling off. The kids have to work together and move around as a unit to avoid it hitting the ground.

4. Relay Race

You could hold a wacky relay race for your kids. There are several good examples of this:

  • Do a three-legged race where two kids’ respective left and right legs are tied together. Then they race against the other teams and the team with the best coordination wins.
  • Do a race where teams of two have to race to the finish line whilst holding a ball between their two stomachs.

There are dozens of relay races you could come up with to work on cooperation between team members. 

5. Puzzles

A group jigsaw puzzle requires a lot of focus and cooperation. They’ll have to work together to find the right pieces and where they go. To make it a little bit competitive, you can give them a tough puzzle and a time limit for finishing it.

Cooperation Games Help Teach Mutual Support

The reason why cooperation games are so important is that they teach the kids that supporting one another is the best way to achieve a goal. The sooner children can develop these social skills, the better off they’ll be in school and on the playground.

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