To put it simply, communication is the process of one person exchanging thoughts with at least one other person.
You don’t need me to tell you that good communication skills are important.
What I want to point out though is that communication is tricky, and definitely a lot trickier than what we usually give it credit for.
Right now, I am communicating to you through a specific type of language called English in which I compose what I want to tell you into various combinations of the 26 letters in the alphabet.
If you are talking face-to-face to someone, then not only you need to process the English language (or any other language), but you also receive simultaneously the tone/rate/volume of their voice, intonation, facial expressions, body postures, context, external environment, and your own thoughts/feelings/reactions (just to name a few!).
Processing all of this information and still keeping the conversation going in a meaningful way is, to put it mildly, tricky. Thanks brain! 🧠
To hammer the point home, let’s play a game right now.
I am going to give you one 7-word sentence. Let’s play around with just its intonation.
Here’s the sentence:
“I didn’t say Mary stole my money.”
Simple sentence right?
If intonation stays relatively flat while saying it, the sentence means “I deny that I ever said Mary stole my money”.
But what happens if we put a stress on the word “I” in the sentence?
Go ahead and try it yourself now!
The meaning of the sentence changes to “Someone else said Mary stole my money”.
Cool, right?
Now before you read any further, play around with the intonation of this sentence and see how many different meanings you can get from it.
You can see if you got the same number as me at the end of this newsletter.
So that’s just changing intonation! No wonder I kept failing English and other English related subjects when I was in high school!
Where do we learn communication skills?
Here’s the thing. There are many ways to learn communication skills, consciously or unconsciously.
To roughly break it down, there are five aspects to learning a language and effectively communicating with it:
Reading
Writing
Listening (comprehension)
Speaking, and
Non-verbal.
We, and our children, would learn most foundational reading and writing skills at school, where we were taught with incrementally more difficult and complex material.
With listening, speaking, and non-verbal aspects, children learn from imitating what is in their environment, such as playing with their friends and interacting with their family.
Children also improve on these aspects when they engage in other life or leisure activities: reading books, watching videos, talking to strangers, presenting in front of a class, and of course… playing board games.
Basically anything that involves exchanges of thoughts and ideas.
For example, my wife, Aimee, has been an avid reader ever since she could physically pick up a book. She can now read approximately 50 times faster than I can in English, and her grammatical instinct is 200 times better than mine (hence she works as an editor for me for free; thanks honey ❤). All skills require time and effort.
Also don’t forget there are non-language based communication skills such as all the art forms: dancing 🩰, acting 👸, music 🎻, drawing 🖼, painting 🎨, sculpting 🗿, just to name a few.
Next time someone says “it is not that difficult to just talk”, you know you are now ready to enlighten them.
How can board games help children to build their communication skills?
Board games are fantastic at helping people connect and have fun. Good communication is often exactly that: connecting people, and often playful.
To be inviting, a well-designed board game is good at breaking extremely complicated concepts down into bite size rules and time-limited structures.
No one wants to play a game that requires you to get a university degree before you start, and might take 15 years before you figure out you didn’t want to play it in the first place!
(That’s why a Job is not usually a very good Game.)
If we find the right board games, we can use them to create a structured, time-limited environment which provides plenty of opportunities to teach specific elements of a certain topic.
This also allows us and our kids to practise the same skills repeatedly, which is how we get better at them.
Take communication for example, it has so many factors to consider (e.g. content, context, tone of voice) and a few aspects that need to be taught and learnt somewhat separately (i.e. reading, writing, listening, speaking, non-verbal).
In the I-didn’t-say-Mary-stole-my-money game, it was (hopefully) fun and easy to grasp because it focused on just one factor, intonation.
In the next Game & Learn series, we focus on a few modern board games that focus on specific factors, or aspects of, Communication, which you can use to help your children practise their skills while playing fun games.
There will be negotiation of beans 🥔, deciphering codes 👩💻, and slowly being stripped of your verbal communication capacities until you can only communicate with facial expressions. Ok I admit the last one sounds terrifying but it is actually super fun 🤯.
Make sure you are subscribed to Game & Learn if you want to know what these games are and how to use them to teach your kids communication skills.
Until then, why not check out our recommendations with the Teamwork series The Mind, Regicide, Unlock! and Forbidden Island? Great teamwork requires great communication, so we are sure you will find these games providing fantastic communication learning experiences for yourself and your kids. 😊
Bonus! And the answer is…
I promised to share with you how many different ways I found to stress different words in the short sentence “I didn’t say Mary stole my money” to get different meanings.
I managed to get 8 ways:
If stressed on “I”, it means “someone else said Mary stole my money.”
If stressed on “didn’t”, it means “I strongly deny that I said Mary stole my money.”
If stressed on “say”, it means “I didn’t verbally suggest Mary stole my money.”
If stressed on “Mary”, it means “I didn’t specifically accuse Mary of stealing my money.”
If stressed on “stole”, it means “I said Mary took my money, but it might be with consent or she might return it.”
If stressed on “my”, it means “I didn’t say the money Mary stole was mine.”
If stressed on “money”, it means “I didn’t say what Mary stole from me was in fact money.”
If intonation stays relatively flat, it means ““I deny that I ever said Mary stole my money”.
Are there any other potential meanings you might get from playing with the intonation of the same sentence? If so, leave us a comment and let us know!
Unit next time, keep gaming, and keep learning!