Playing the cards you're dealt

James was up very early today, as usual. He sat himself down in front of the family computer and started playing solitaire. Thankfully we don’t have any shoot ‘em up games on the computer.

I spent a bit of time helping him with a few moves and coaching him. Perhaps I should say I was coaching myself to resist the urge to just grab the mouse and do all the moves myself.

I reckon solitaire, or patience as we’ve always called it, is a great learning game. It teaches you that there is sometimes a number of options to take and you don’t always know which is the best choice until after you’ve made it. And the fact that you don’t always get the game out teaches that things don’t always work out exactly how you’d like, but you have to just get up, start again and see if it all comes together the next time.

The interesting thing is that we’re going away for a couple of nights soon and I asked James if he’d like me to bring a real deck of cards and teach him to play the game with them. He was absolutely thrilled with the idea. He wants to bring his Shrek cards to play. Being just 6 years of age I don’t think he’s ever seen patience played with real cards before. Come to think of it, Emily’s almost 9 and I wonder if she’s seen us play the game with a deck of cards before.

There are so many things that we take for granted that our children have never known. Even something like playing a simple card game with real cards.

Posted by Rodney Olsen

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