Parents –Tips to Help Your Child Participate:
If you’re an adult who wants to play and enter this Holiday Drawing, welcome! Have fun and enjoy!
If you are a parent wondering whether this would be a worthy activity for your child to take part in, here are some thoughts for you.
Solving the 25 EASY Rush Hour Challenges in Perfect Score is a tall order! But you know what? It’s likely that you child will want to do it, and won’t give up until the job is done.
There are a few simple steps you can encourage your child to follow, and that you can follow yourself, that can make their playing experience even better while creating an opportunity for you to bond together as a family. Here’s what we recommend.
1) Start by talking with them about how big a challenge this is. Explain to them that when you have a big challenge like this, you need to start out by understanding what your goal really is, and thinking about what it will take to get from here to there. The way to do this is to set milestones, places along the way where you can stop and say “I have reached the place I wanted to reach”. Talk this through with your child at the beginning, and keep a record of what you agreed on as the initial goal and milestones. A milestone in this case might be to finish five perfect score challenges, then to finish 10 challenges, and to continue this way until the job is done.
2) Decide on a schedule when your child will clear time to play Rush Hour at a regular time, and try to stick to that schedule. It’s likely that she will play more than this allotted time… what is important here is that this gives you an opportunity to get your child used to a regular routine for many activities. What you can accomplish here is to get your children to model how to follow a steady schedule, and also to get them to pace themselves and learn to come back to a task and pick it up again. These are important life skills.
3) Consider having your child keep a journal describing how they thought and how they felt as they played through the 25 challenges. It doesn’t matter exactly what they say, please be creative with your ideas. What matters is the transition in how they describe the challenges from beginning to end, as they develop expertise and gain confidence. Children don’t naturally like writing about their thoughts… so don’t push it if they don’t want to try this idea. For those who are willing to try it, it can be very rewarding.
4) Play through the challenges together with them, to get involved in the fun and learn along with them. Once you are a team partner with your child, working together to reach the perfect score, encourage him to explain his thinking when s/he recommends a certain move, and tell her your thoughts about a move you like. Be very careful not to be too dominant… try to learn as much as you teach. You goal is to encourage your dialogue about thinking through the challenge, and describing the thinking process. This is very refined stuff… treasure it when you get it!
5) The rules of our contest are that you must be 18 years or older to participate. While encouraging your child to play through the challenges and enjoy their experience, the submission must be done by you as an adult. We are not able to accept contest submissions by people younger than 18 years old
6) Keep your fingers crossed with them on December 31st when we hold our Holiday Drawing and you find out whether you’ve won a Big Holiday Basket of ThinkFun games!