The Best Games for Six-Year-Old Girls

Pac-Man

• Stimulate your 6-year-old girl's problem-solving skills by giving her maze games to play. There exist many maze-type games on the Internet that you can play free. Pac-Man, an arcade game invented in 1979, is among the oldest and the most popular. By moving the Pac-Man through a series of mazes in all directions while avoiding the dangerous ghosts, your child must think quickly to stay alive. In addition to being an exciting game, Pac-Man boosts your child's skills to respond quickly to problems.

Tea Mime

• Improve your 6-year-old girl's social skills and let her invite girlfriends over for a tea party game. Encourage your little girl to get to know her friends better by playing a game of tea mime, where you write down each guest's name on paper, put them in a hat and have each guest pick a name from a hat. Then ask the girls to act (by miming) the person whose name they drew. Let the girls build their friendship and have fun impersonating each other, all while having yummy desserts and tea.

Tag

• Improve your 6-year-old girl's athleticism and sportsmanship with a game of tag. If you have a decent- sized backyard, invite a group of her friends over. Designate one person as the "it" person, and have her run around touching, or tagging, everyone else. The next person she tags becomes the next "it," and that "it" gets to run and touch the next person, spreading the privilege of being "it." All the running around becomes good exercise for the girls, and they can have fun doing it too.

Chutes and Ladders

• Chutes and Ladders is a classic board game that is both easy and fun to play. Each player has a pawn that moves up numbered squares on the board. If the pawn ends up at the bottom of the ladder, it moves up the entire ladder. The picture at the top depicts a good deed, such as mowing the lawn. If the pawn ends up at the top of the chute, it falls down. This picture depicts a bad deed, such as eating too many candies. The concept for your child to learn is that good deeds get you up the ladder and increase your numbers, and bad deeds send you down the ladder and down in numbers. Not only does Chutes and Ladders help your child understand the ideas of reward (climbing up the ladder) and punishment (falling down the chute), it teaches her how to count as well.

Scrabble Junior

• Scrabble Junior helps children learn how to spell, read, and add. Instead of a blank board like real Scrabble, Scrabble Junior already has words spelled out on the board, with pictures to help identify them. Players lay down tiles to finish the words and earn points. Although a 6-year-old does not know many words yet, Scrabble Junior helps her gain a bigger vocabulary while teaching her to add up points when keeping score.