I won’t pretend to be an expert on child development, but I was a PE teacher for for a decade and spent a lot of time playing games with kids. It was always interesting to see the young ones (K-2, say) as they progressed in their understanding of how games are played.
We started off very simply learning to take turns. That’s a big deal, and I think it has a lot to do with them realizing there are other people in the world with needs beyond their own. And it can be hard for them at first. By allowing someone else to do something fun instead of them momentarily, they are also learning to delay gratification.
Simon Says was great for learning to follow directions. Again, I started that extremely simply and nobody had to sit out if they missed. I’d just call them on a mistake, we’d all laugh and continue. It was also great for simply developing some stamina - being able to pay attention for a period of time.
We practiced a lot of moving in general space. This combined following instructions (walk, skip, hop, jog) with having to be aware of the people around them. That’s a lot for little kids to process. Once we could do that safely I would introduce tag games. These often involved helping each other, which again calls attention to other peoples’ needs. So in Tunnel Tag, if you got touched by a tagger you stood still with your feet apart and hand raised and another player could free you by crawling through (and taggers could not tag someone performing a rescue).
Around the middle of first grade we would play games that involved some basic strategies. There was a lot of variability in how the kids took to it, I think depending on various factors in how they learned. Lots of times kids will just do what they see others doing, and getting them to do plan something different and carry it out is pretty damn subtle. Example:
We would play a team tag game. Each team lined up about 15 feet apart, one being the ‘odds’ and the other being ‘evens’ (this was tied into their learning odd / even numbers in class). I would roll a big foam dice in the middle and if it came down an odd number they would get to chase and tag the evens, and vice versa. Here’s what would always happen: At some point a kid would make a mistake and retreat when his team could have been taggers, and everyone would follow them. I’d stop the game and explain the mistake and tell them to think, not just follow everyone else. And sure enough there would be a dice roll where a whole team would do the wrong thing except for one kid who stood his ground correctly and made a tag or three very quickly. I’d always call attention to that success, and I was thrilled for the kid who was able to think decisively in that situation.
A slightly edgy thing I would do… I would cheat overtly occasionally. While playing a tag game I would idly hold a tagger (we used beanbags or foam arrows) and call a kid over as if I wanted to talk to them. They would gamely trot over, at which point I’d tag them. They would be incredulous at this (and it was all done with laughs and smiles), but would never fall for it a second time. We would talk about this as a class afterwards, with me promising to play fair and properly from then on.
I felt it was a benign way of demonstrating that not everyone was going to do the right thing, or even have good intentions. And that they had to watch for situations like that and stand up for themselves.
I would do similar things, purposely misunderstanding or denying reality.
“Oh, you’re six years old? I was never six. I skipped directly from five to seven. Had to get special permission for that.”
The kids would turn that one over in their heads and then challenge me, which is what I wanted. I really enjoyed making them think and seeing them get more sophisticated over time. It seemed that grade 3 was a turning point. They were emerging from little kid-hood and becoming big kids.
Don’t miss the nonsense of being a teacher, but I do miss the kids sometimes.