Playing Games

We have a few games 0on the bottom shelf of the book case, so Elise can play with them. In the last several weeks she has been exploring, and while she still loves books on the second shelf up, she has been discovering the joys of games on the bottom shelf. She loves Jumping Monkeys, Candyland, a matching game with tiles, various puzzles, and recently has become quite good at Connect 4. I try to get pictures of her playing these games, because her versions of play are uniquely different from the rules that come with the games.
For instance, in Jumping Monkeys, we spend the time putting the tree together, taking it apart, putting monkeys on the tree then shaking the tree so the monkeys come off, and sometimes making the monkeys jump off the little ramps.
For Connect 4 she gets a token, puts it in the slot, gets another token of a different color and puts it in the slot, disregarding maneuvering for positions, and continues to put tokens in, until she decides it is time to put them back in their storage columns. She loves to do this, and will take a long time putting them one at a time into the columns, until the game is over.
Candy land is another fun one. She likes to put the pieces on the board, then dump the card all over the floor. We sort the cards, we stack the cards, we put them in a baggy, we dump them out. We can play Candyland for a long time.

One of the fun things about all this game experience is teaching Elise a sign for a game, and then watching her remember the sign the next time we pull out the game, and then she can start asking to play a game by signing the name and then going to the shelf to get the game out. I am looking forward to having many hours spent playing lots of fun games with this sweet girl!