Games for Children's Development - Hilda A. Wrightson

The training of the physical co-ordinations of children is most naturally accomplished through the medium of games.

Miss Wrightson has brought together in convenient form a large number of games especially adapted to accomplish these results. Her long experience with children is a guarantee of their usefulness and efficacy for the purpose.

­It should be fully appreciated by teachers, parents and superintendents that the playing of these games is not "mere play," but definite training of the best kind. In many cases there is little else to be done.

­The teacher should select such games as are most interesting to her special group and practice these until the children are reasonably proficient in them or until they prove uninteresting.

The teacher familiar only with normal minds will perhaps think some of the games here described of no value. It is always hard for the more intelligent to understand the less intelligent, for normal teachers to understand sub-normal children. It should be remembered that the joy of accomplishment is one of the greatest joys of life for all grades of intelligence. It is the fact that the list includes games adapted to the simplest minds which constitutes one of its excellencies.

It should not be forgotten that these games not only develop co-ordination and attention; manners, morals, self-control, altruism, patience and many more desirable qualities are involved. What more can education do than develop to the limit of the individual's capacity these qualities which, possessed even in a small degree, will help to make him a social rather than an anti-social being!

Inasmuch as normal children are much like feeble-minded children OF THE SAME MENTAL AGE, though with more spontaneity, it is clear that these games will be of equal value to young normal children and will have great value in helping them to develop their latent powers and to work off their natural energy in profitable ways.

121 pages