Games for Visual Spatial Skills

I bet your homeschool family draws a lot – at least doodles, and little sketches to explain the answers to kids’ questions, and notes to each other. Plenty of families have also found helpful art or drawing curricula, but my family prefers – you guessed it! – board games.

The classic drawing game is Pictionary. We have the very first edition, and I remember loving this game when it first came out in the 1980’s. In Pictionary, one player from a team picks a card and then has until the timer runs out to get the rest of the team to guess the word on the card, by drawing a picture. Certain rules are followed – you can’t draw anything you’d find on a keyboard, so no letters, numbers, or symbols like #. It’s a great family game – available in Junior editions too – and is excellent for helping reluctant artists (like my perfectionist son who struggles with the frustration of not being able to draw as well as he wants to). Everyone is under time pressure so all the players are making hasty scribbles and stick figures, so it’s a pretty even playing field. The guessing end is good for visualization skills as well – shouting out guesses as the drawing is still being made involves a lot of great thinking skills.

A very similar game that was made in the 1990’s was called Clay Mania. The game was played in almost the same way as Pictionary, but clay was used instead of a pencil and paper. It helps with many of the same visual spatial skills, but this time in all three dimensions. It’s also great for hand strength and fine motor skills! If you can’t find a copy of Clay Mania at a thrift store or garage sale, you could play it your own way with a deck of word cards from Pictionary or a similar game – or even words written on index cards – and a fresh batch of homemade playdough.

Another game that is a fresh twist on this idea is called Squint. In Squint, players are challenged to use a deck of cards with lines and markings on them (a diagonal line, a semi-circle, two small circles, and so on) to create a two-dimensional picture of the word on the card. For example, a player might use two long lines, an X and two small circles to build a pair of scissors, or three large circles and two diagonal lines to build a snowman. Squint is a good game for breaking down larger objects into composite pieces, which is a good skill to have for later artistic endeavors. There is a new Junior version of Squint which I have just reviewed over at Mind Games, so click through to see more about that!

One of our favorite games for both visual spatial skills and listening and communication skills was an older game called Listen Up! In this game, one player had to give another player instructions to draw an object. I recently learned that a new take on this old favorite theme has been released, called Backseat Drawing. In Backseat Drawing, the describing player has to use technical terms for the drawing, such as “make two perpendicular diagonal lines which cross in the middle” instead of “draw the letter X” or “an elongated ellipse” rather than “an egg.” The other player does the best she can to follow these directions, and when the timer runs out, the drawing player has to guess what it is that she has drawn! It’s excellent for breaking down a drawing into parts as well as learning to give instructions that are as precise and descriptive as possible, as well as being both slow enough to be followed and quick enough to finish before the time runs out. Out of the Box Games has recently released a great version called Backseat Drawing Junior, which I have also just reviewed at Mind Games – if you’re interested in having your own copy, come check it out!

Does your family play any other games which help kids with these building-block visual spatial skills? I’d love to hear about them!

PisecoMom homeschools her kids on a curriculum rich in board games at Mind Games.

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