About four weeks to completely shut down in the UK. It's been a month since schools closed. Which means it's been a month since my wife Laura and I were given the responsibility of special education for our five-year-old Toby.
We're all in this. That's pretty cool. If you are a parent, you will know about homework assignments, filled with dozens of tasks to complete, and resources to throw in your inbox. Lorry loads of stuffed luggage are lost in your hands, brought by kicking schools. No one knows how much they have to make, but every parent feels like they are not doing enough. And everyone else feels like they have no problem, you're not the only one. If you too feel burdened by the almost unimaginable responsibility of making your child a future with a tangible future, I want to bring you two calm messages:
1) No, that's not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to be their parent, surround them with love in these well-known times, and if you find something to learn there, then you succeed.
2) It turns out Animal Crossing contains the whole school for the first syllabus.
Crossing the Animals: New Horizons you are my first Animal Crossing a game. Frankly, I've never understood the complaint before. It always seemed like a way to spend my leisure time doing all the activities I was trying to avoid by having some leisure time. But in this case, in the strange world we now live in, the idea of a beautiful home on an island surrounded by happy people, threatening my time with menial jobs, seemed like an irreplaceable paradise. So my boy wanted to see what I was playing.
It was not even minutes before I sat down on the couch with Toby that I realized there was something here. He was immediately impressed, enough to finally find the motivation to find out his concerns about game controllers. The fact that there were bugs in the net and catching fish meant he was inside, and he was determined enough to get two analogue sticks. In fact, it was his determination that he first volunteered to read the words on the screen so he could do so. He wanted to make a fishing rod, so "f-i-sh-ing r-od" would learn. By volunteering! Without threats or bribes! What magic is this?!?
And it went on. Seriously, Animal Crossing puts key words in a different color for every unnecessary conversation. So I read it out until we reached the blue word, and Toby read that one. It's not hard work, because he wants to know what this has to do with more than just one of his 3 books of unpleasant sound. Here he reads every sentence voluntarily, because it will tell him how to find the next thing he wants.
He was immediately translating four-digit numbers, far more than what they had tried to teach him in his first year at school. She wanted to know how many breasts she had. "Two thousand and fifty, father?" Yes! Okay! It's amazing! Yesterday morning while playing he read 14,192. I don't think he even knew he could do that.
And then go shopping. Every first year class has shops that pretend to be. Understanding how money works is an important part of education. Until recently, as in days gone by, Toby's version of the toy store didn't mean he'd insist on giving you the money you need to buy anything. Which may be a surprising store, but not perhaps a long-term business strategy. In Animal Crossing, Toby realizes that he has to hand Bell over to Timmy to get things back. And he will come back and sell shells and weeds.
What about dates and times? OK, maybe those have just become less important metrics for most of us, as all of our calendars dissolve into the amorphous one ambiguous one amiguel today. But thanks to a game-time that mimics real life, here's my boy learning the real day, and what time of the day, in a way he never understood before.
Oh, and you need five branches to make that fishing rod? How many items do you have? 2? Now how much do you need? His fingers come out, he counts it, and he delights in finding the answer, rushing to fulfill that purpose. And there, the stats range from invisible irritation to active programming.
I was sitting on the sofa, a coffee shell standing in my stomach, thinking, "I am nailing this."
We didn't know what we would do when they closed schools. Laura and I both own businesses at home, and as a result were totally dependent on those six hours of infertility a day. Soon came a bizarre interview, a shocked set-up, a time of overconfidence being written and then scrawled in one day. There was the belief that we now had to become qualified primary school teachers overnight, except for the three years of university education we usually have.
And of course that is all rubbish. As a human being it has a beautiful and opposing appearance Facebook forwards put it simply, “This is not going to school. This is an unprecedented emergency … Honestly, everyone is trying to separate their figures from their margins, because none of us know what we're doing. ”And of course, it was Animal Crossing that made all of these clicks on me.
It really helps that it's a fun and open game in a five year sense. Toby's tent now has a zoo inside and out, after finding out that he can catch fish with curtains. He has also discovered that he can take off all his clothes and throw all my belongings into the sea. It might be all you learn.
But the list of its contributions continues. You have to keep what you want to have. Sharing helps you move forward in this game. Shaking the trees makes the money go out. It's a social game, where being kind to your friends makes their lives better, and then yours gets better – my goodness, if it was the only thing he learned throughout his school life, I'd be happy. And then there's all this great information about fish, bugs and dinosaurs. Which just happens to be his three main topics of interest. Heck, there's a museum / aquarium constantly growing around you, at a time when that's not possible.
Toby had just entered the room, so I asked, “What did you learn from Animal Crossing? ”He has released a list of controls, and how he can jump over rivers with a pole. He doesn't care. And of course, alongside all the other play-based learning we do, you gain a lot of confidence in reading, numbers, and use of reading each time we sit down to play. He obviously spends more time wandering around the garden, and doing home invasion studies, than sitting on a switch. I do not recommend replacing the primary education system with the Nintendo & # 39; s capitalism system. Toby's patience for anything is generally short, so if we can play an hour every few days I'm in luck. But it proved a totally fun part of schooling, and it definitely helped me to learn that learning is something that can be done in many ways. I am not a teacher. I don't have to be a teacher. But I'm a dad, and that's a job I want to focus on.
ACrossing he has never shown me a safe place for me in these turbulent times, as my mental health falls under me, but also a fun way to watch my boy learn I know he does. That, and emphasizing her character goes everywhere in her underwear, while digging all my plants.
* Restoring the UK to the US translation service: In the UK, a primary school begins in September before the child is 5, often referred to as the year of adoption. In the US, compulsory school years are determined by the federal government, varying from 5 to 8.
John Walker is a freedom game critic, who currently spends most of his time finding indie gems that can't be found website. You can support it Patreon.
