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Sample IQ Booster Games

By Brent R. Evans, Copyright Ó 1999 - 2003  http://www.learningsuccess.com

Introduction

Games can be powerful tools that significantly boost personal development, learning achievement, and school success if:

1. The games are specially designed to develop important abilities or teach specific skills or concepts. When a collection of games is organized to cover a complete subject, in this case IQ development, then it becomes a tremendous support system that practically assures success. It also makes certain important IQ skills are not missed. What advantage can this be for your child? Well, consider that even a 5% increase in developing IQ skills over a ten-year period can result in a three-year advantage due to the power of compounding! Truly, even small differences can result in greatly increased success opportunities!

2. The games are designed to put into instant action powerful teaching methods, learning principles, conditions, and strategies that would best teach or develop each specific skill or concept. This means parents do not have to be professional teachers or learning experts to provide the best learning conditions for their children. Even professional teachers at school can extend their impact to additional individuals and small groups within the classroom without one-to-one assistance and still be assured each learning activity is appropriate, effective, and targeted to specific IQ skills.  An added advantage is that players become increasingly aware of basic IQ skills and how they can best be used in learning situations.

3. The games are fun! This means players will want to spend many extra hours developing the skills the games are targeted to achieve. Time spent playing the games will not be experienced as work or study!

4. The games are instantly available and require no hard-to-store pieces. The best games are game ideas that use items that are usually around anyway, like paper, pencils, dice, cards, etc. This means players have instant access to all of the games and do not need to learn complex instructions.

5. The games are economical and you do not need to continually buy new ones as your child progresses from one skill level to another. For example, in the Learning Success IQ Boosters book, there are almost a thousand games and activities covering the most important IQ skills as measured by popular IQ tests. It is a complete support system for each child through all of those years!

6. Adults will also benefit. The same activities and games that can help your children develop basic IQ skills, will also boost your own IQ skills.

Verbal Information & Alertness

Post a Map of the World - Place a large map of the world on a bulletin board or wall. A good location would be within sight of where you regularly have breakfast or dinner. Include a supply of colored pins, yarn, and 3 x 5 cards. Each day, select a news article or two, discuss them, cut them out, and then place them to the side of the map. Connect the articles to the geographical locations they refer to with colored yarn. Make it a habit, and watch each person’s fund of information grow.

    Write vocabulary words and their definitions related to the news articles on cards and keep next to the articles.

    Use the map when discussing your child’s history assignments.

    Keep a bookmark in the W volume of your encyclopedia where a map of the world is located.

Ability to Organize and Generalize What is Known

CATEGORY ALPHABET RACE - Players divide into teams.   A category is chosen such as plants, animals, authors, movies, emotions, different forms of recreation, etc.  Each team writes the letters of the alphabet, except x and z, down the left side of their playing papers.  The object of the game is to write a word, name, or title starting with as many letters of the alphabet as possible for the chosen category.  Examples:

                        Emotions                   Animals

                        A - angry                   A - anteater

                        B - brooding              B - bison

                        C - caring                   C - cougar

                        D - dejected               D - deer

                        E - enthusiastic          E - elephant 

When time is called, discuss each player's selections and whether they in fact fit the chosen category.  Give each player a point for each letter in each word that is correctly spelled.  In the example above, five points would be earned for angry, eight points for brooding, six points for caring, etc.  Player with the most points for the whole list wins.  Any player misspelling a word can still receive full credit if he or she can learn to spell the word or words within ten minutes of the end of the game. For pre-printed Alphabet Category Game Sheets, and an additional way of playing this game, simply use the link below. http://www.learningsuccess.com/Alphabet%20Category%20Game%20Sheet.pdf

Mental Math Skills

License Plate Answers - Players take turns coming up with equations using the digits in the license plates on cars they see. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division may be used and the digits can be calculated in any order. A player must first get 0 as an answer, and then 1, 2, 3, … 10. A player won’t always be able to get the answer needed from a particular license plate, so must try again with another plate. First player to go successfully from 0 to 10 wins the game. Example: license plate digits are 2 – 3 – 5. Solution: 2 + 3 = 5 and 5 – 5 = 0. Next time, player tries to get an answer of 1 from another license plate.

Vocabulary

SHARE NEW WORDS AT MEALTIMES - Make it a habit to share new and interesting words at mealtime.  Establish the tradition of each person to introduce one word each evening or morning meal.  The word should be written on a card and shown to the others, pronounced correctly, and then defined.  Have the person indicate how it came to his or her attention.  Each word can become the start of an interesting conversation.  After dinner, place the cards on the family bulletin board or refrigerator.  An alternative would be to prepare a deck of desirable words to learn, along with their definitions, and place one next to each plate.  Family members take turns reading their words and definitions.

Practical Living Skills & Good Judgment

SHARE PROBLEM EXPERIENCES - Share experiences you have had in dealing with particular types of problems.  Each person should talk about problems they have faced in life, how they arose, and how they dealt with them.

Listening and Remembering Skills

DIRECTION DUELS - Prepare a set of direction cards.  See examples below, but come up with extra ones of your own you feel would be fun to use.  Shuffle the cards.  Leader reads aloud the first direction, and the first player tries to follow it.  If he succeeds, the leader reads the next card, and the next player tries to carry out both directions.  Leader adds one new direction each turn until a player makes a mistake and doesn't follow all of the directions correctly in the exact sequence given.  The last successful player scores the same number of points as directions he or she carried out successfully.  Leader shuffles cards, and a new round begins.  Player winning the most points after a certain number of rounds, or when time is called, wins the game.  Examples of directions:

Close a door.
Say the alphabet in order.
Take off a shoe.
Beat your chest and give a Tarzan yell.
Jump up and down three times.
Fall off your chair laughing.
Complain about the weather.
Say your favorite color.
Comb your hair.
Stand on one foot and say your name.
Pretend you are petting a dog.
Sneeze.
Tell someone you love him or her.
 

Visual Information & Alertness

SKETCH WHAT YOU SEE - Keep a supply of unlined paper in the program section of your WINNER on which to sketch objects and scenes.  There are an infinite number of possible things to sketch, such as cars, animals, household objects, houses, cloud formations, trees, etc. It's fun, and at the same time significantly develops your power of visual observation. Pick a new element in your environment each week to notice.  For example, one week you could concentrate on noticing trees. It would be helpful to look up trees in your illustrated encyclopedia, or talk with other people as to the trees they can recognize by name.  Notice similarities and differences in trees.  Try to memorize the names of ones you can identify.  Next week, you might concentrate on flowers or shrubbery.  The following week you might pay particular attention to people's faces.

Understanding Sequence/Cause & Effect in Social Situations

DRAW WHAT HAPPENED - When a significant feeling or problem comes up, try to draw the series of events that led up to it.  Use stick figures, and draw a sequence as you would a cartoon strip.  If several people are involved, each person's sequence should be drawn from his or her own point of view.  Either have each new person's sequences drawn right below the others, or they could be drawn on separate papers, and then placed so all the sequences could be compared and shown at one time.  Discuss what feelings were being felt at particular points and what these reactions led to.  In most cases, it will be clear that people are acting and reacting from different points of view.  When this becomes evident, problems almost solve themselves and feelings and actions become better understood.

Designing and Constructing with Model

HALF & HALF DRAWINGS - Cut a picture of a person, animal, scene, or object in half.  Paste one of the halves on a sheet of paper.  Then player tries to draw the other half.  Player might even draw a background for his picture.  It makes an interesting picture and encourages noticing details and proportion.

Designing and Constructing without Model

CREATE, OPERATE, OR FIX THINGS - Each person should learn how to create, fix, or operate something new each month.  Examples: change the oil in the car, strip paint, wax the floor, set a digital watch, program the VCR.  Sometimes, learning these new skills will involve some frustration.  Not everything will be clear the first time you try do something.  Even the most detailed instructions will have gaps and ambiguities.  Learning to deal effectively with frustration is an important achievement that will pay off throughout a person's life.  It is important to realize that ambiguity and temporary frustration is a part of learning, but that success will follow continued effort.  Each month as members of the family preview possibilities of tasks to learn, they will become more aware of new ones.  As they develop new skills each month, their confidence will grow.  Each person should keep an accumulated list of skills they have learned, along with any notes they need to refer to for the skill on which they are currently working.

Seeing and Remembering Skills

FLIP-OVER STUDY TECHNIQUE - Make two photo-copies of illustrative information from your encyclopedia.  One copy should include the labels to the illustration.  The second copy should have the labels removed by cutting them out or covering them with liquid paper.  Put the labeled illustration in the front side of a Winner-size plastic sheet protector, and the unlabeled copy on the back side.  Place the sheet protector in the Program Section of your WINNER.  Now, you can study the illustration and master the labels or vocabulary during your regular Planning and Thinking Times or during waiting periods during the day.  When you have mastered one illustration, put in another one.  Think of the results you will achieve during the next few months.  For starters, you might want to look up BODY, HUMAN in The New Book of Knowledge.  You will find great illustrations and explanations to major organs of the body, cross section of skin and its parts and functions, human skeleton and bones, muscles, digestive system, circulatory system, respiratory system, brain and nervous system, and more.  Other information you might master using the Flip-Over Study Technique are parts and functions of automobile engines and systems or geographical information found on maps.  The possibilities are unlimited.

Visual-Motor Skills

CHALKBOARD DRAWING - The simplest thing you can do to encourage visual-motor skills is to place a large chalkboard in your home on which you child can freely draw, scribble, or make designs.  Once in awhile, you might show your child how to draw particular things, such as three-dimensional boxes, stars, ears, cartoon characters, etc.  But most of the time, just let your child draw what he or she feels like drawing.  You will soon see the other values of a chalkboard, as your children review skills learned in their classes by playing school with younger children, and the ease at which you can help children learn reading, writing, and math skills by doing chalkboard activities.

Creativity

CREATIVE TABLE DECORATIONS - A beautiful way to develop creativity as well as visual and spatial thinking skills is to plan various table decorations.  What new ways could the dinner table be attractive, and perhaps meaningful to the season or special events?  The decorations could include figurines as well as flowers and more traditional table decorations.  Young children could make scenes or objects from play dough as a regular centerpiece.  The centerpiece could be a shallow, decorated box turned upside down.  Members of the family could draw special placemats with pictures relative to the occasion, or make paper houses and scenes.  Have the the possibilities started forming in your mind?  Think of the possibilities for Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Easter, special accomplishments, each week's character trait, items in the news, theme for the day, ...  Here are some ideas for Valentine's Day.  Paste red hearts on paper doilies and attach to the walls joined with swags of crepe paper.  Prepare large doily place mats with hearts.  Place red and white crepe paper streamers down the center of the table, either flat or twisted.  Tie red and white balloons along them.  Tie three balloons together in the center of the table with curly gift wrapping ribbons coming out from under them.  Decorate your napkin holders with paper or candy hearts.