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DS Games for Pre-readers?
ProfJonathan writes "My daughter just got a DS from the grandparents for her 6th birthday. She's only beginning to read, but wants a bunch of games of her own rather than just playing her older brothers' games. She got Nintendogs with the DS, so that's taken care of, but other relatives are asking what she might want. Can anyone recommend some good DS games that don't require reading skill, that might be age-appropriate and interesting for a 1st grade girl?" Wouldn't it be creepy if the kid had a really good brain age?
She is 6 and cannot read? I would focus on that part first before letting her play games.
Why not make this a good opportunity to teach her how to read -- you're never too young to learn. If she encounters something she can't read, read it for her, or you can sit next to her as she plays the game. It's a great way to get kids to read without making them feel like it's a chore. The animation of the scenarios can help her understand what she's reading too.
To answer your question, I believe the new Super Mario would be a good choice.
If she is six and cannot read then I doubt it....
Umm, I have a few friends with a 2-1/2 and 3 year olds. They're already starting to teach their kids to read. You may want to focus on that instead of giving her games. Buy her some books. Let her play the DS after spending 30-60 minutes of time a day working on reading.
I'm surprised that she's only beginning to read at age 6. Myself and most of my friends were reading Hardy Boys books at that age. My son just turned 3 now, and he's quite able to read Berenstein Bears and similar books by himself. My nephew is 5, and he just finished his first Goosebumps book.
It's too late to rectify the situation now, but your daughter probably should have started to read when she was two or three years old. By the time she's six, she should be quite able to read newspapers, magazines, and novels the size of the Hardy Boys books.
You should get her involved in a local library group for children, where they read actual books. Some of these programs reward children for the more books that they read, which provides the incentive necessary for some children. Of course, many children just end up reading because they enjoy it.
You've left me wondering why you want recommendations of games that don't involve reading. Six years old is hardly too young to be learning how to read. If anything, you want games that will help teach reading. So what you really want is a game that has reading in it, but can still be understood even by a gamer who isn't a good reader yet. There are many games that fit that bill. As a suggestion, check out Meteos. It's a really great puzzle game with five different levels of difficulty (so she'll be able to win it at least on the lowest level), and after completing the campaign mode, there are a multitude of all-text epilogues explaining how your victory (or lack thereof) in the final level affected events. That's a great way to practice reading. You can sit down with her and read it for her when she's playing; it'll be a good lesson, and she'll be interested because she'll want to know how the game ended up.
Incidentally, I first learned the word "Congratulations" when it popped up at the end of a particularly hard Game Boy game I had been playing for a long while (this was when I was really young). I asked my dad what it said. After that, I was more proud of being able to read such a long word than at having beaten the game.
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I wish I could mod up the second half of your post. Parental involvement is vital to teaching reading. If you are not reading books with your children then you giving them a serious disadvantage in modern society. That said, if she is six then you are about four years too late. The original poster is either a negligent parent, or his daughter has serious learning difficulties. If the latter is the case then he should get her to a child psychologist, who can probably give him some good recommendations for games that will be beneficial to her. If it's the former, then making her spend more time without parental attention will not help matters at all.
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I played video games a LOT when I was a teenager, but it's stories like this that make me extremely happy that my eight year old boy loves going outside, building stuff with wood, taking things apart, reading books, and generally hates video games from the times he's gone over to his friends' houses.
It's only later in life that I realized that video games are basically mental sugary sweets. They're empty entertainment that exist solely to cause your mental wheels to spin. I don't subscribe to them being actively harmful, but the lost opportunity cost for growth is significant.
I personally think this DS needs to "accidentally" get thrown in the bathtub, and then replace it with reading, crafts, piano lessons, etc.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Better to have her learn at a young age the difference between reasonable, and unreasonable, demands. Fail here, and you'll pay an ever more expensive price each year for decades to come.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is a really good "game" for a younger (starting from three), I let my son play with it. It doesn't focus on 'winning', 'baddies', killing people or whatever, it is just an introduction to music, sounds, ... He LOVES it.
Of course, he likes also me playing with him to it, and making mario boucing into walls at super mario world really makes him laugh.
You exemplify a growing trend for people to spend way too much fucking time raising everyone else's kids.
How about you just worry about your own, let he worry about his, while I worry about mine?
You OK with that, champ?
Or would you really prefer that everyone else tell you what to do with your own children, too? I'm sure that no matter what you say about them, I can find something sufficiently abnormal about your statement to feed a steady stream of admonishment toward you, your children, and your methods of raising a family...
But I won't. It's not my job to raise your kids.
Kid-proof tablet..
Nobody knows how to raise kids the first time, many not even the second time. Seemingly its getting worse with all the daycare crap these days, but a parent with a 3 year old isn't going to be better at raising a 10 year old than the master of the basement.
While I wholeheartedly agree that getting outside the house while young is important, so is reading and these days games can serve as a nice portable substitute for picture books, and a good game can draw a child in a lot better than most picture books will which will be more conducive to wanting to read more.
That said kudos on asking for help, great step to take as a lot of parents don't do it for the same reason we wouldn't put our hand up in school, because they'd look dumb. At the end of the day of course the kid with his hand in the air was the better student and the parent who asks others for guidance is going to raise their kid better.
As for some good - I really stress that introducing your kid to good quality entertainment is important as it'll affect the development of their sense of humour and artistic values - DS games that should encourage reading I recommend Dragon Quest Rocket Slime as it has text but won't require a dictionary on hand, its designed for kids but plays well enough for anybody. For games that don't really have any text Mario and Kirby games are good choices. That said to further the reading Pokemon and Zelda are good choices, but you'll most likely need to play with her, which is what you should be doing anyway. Picross, Tetris and Warioware would be relatively mentally stimulating games for a child.