Activities that Promote Healthy Competition

June / 2019

To complete our healthy competition series, we’re sharing different activities that are great for helping kids practice healthy competition.

At Blocks Rock!, we believe healthy competition is good for kids. That is why we’ve written about what healthy competition is and how to encourage healthy competition in kids. To complete our healthy competition series, we’re sharing different activities that are great for helping kids practice healthy competition.

How We Chose Activities that Promote Healthy Competition

It should be noted that healthy competition is something that can be practiced during any game or activity. As we mentioned in How to Encourage Healthy Competition in Kids, there are a few main ways to help kids practice healthy competition. 

In no particular order, these ways are: 

  • Focus on personal goals

  • Celebrate improvements and achievements

  • Reinforce positive messages about competition

  • Take away punishment

  • Play both collaborative and competitive activities

  • Be a good role model

As you can see, these basic principles for promoting healthy competition can be applied to almost any activity. 

However, we believe that some activities naturally lend themselves to being better activities for practicing healthy competition than others. Below, we’ve listed qualities of games and activities that you might look for when helping your child practice healthy competition skills.

Look for Activities that Promote Collaboration & Teamwork

Since one of the ways to encourage healthy competition is to play both collaborative and competitive activities, we believe that games that support collaboration are a good place to start! Look for activities where multiple players can work together towards a common goal. The first thing that comes to mind might be sports, which can be great activities for teaching kids healthy competition! However, there are plenty of collaborative games in addition to sports, such as:

  • Blocks Rock! | You can play both with kids individually facing each other or use the app to have multiple kids build the larger structures.  

  • Cooperative Board Games for Kids | Games like Hoot Hoot Owl, Race to the Treasure, Stone Soup, and more provide opportunities for kids to work together.

  • Puzzles | Puzzles encourage kids to work together as they solve the puzzle and bring the picture to life. You can add a competitive element by having groups compete to see who can complete their puzzle the fastest.

Treasure Hunts | Kids will learn how to work together to solve clues and search for the hidden treasure!

Look for Activities Where You Can Measure Improvement

Two of the main ways to promote healthy competition are to focus on personal goals and celebrate improvements and achievements. To do this, you have to have a game where you can help a child set a desired goal ahead of time and then measure to see if they’re working to reach that goal. Some activities that are good for setting personal goals on improvement include:

  • Sports | There’s a reason most people think of sports when they think about healthy competition. Sports can be a great activity for kids to help them instill intrinsic motivation in them and help them set personal goals. For instance, sports like swimming and running allow your child to set time goals to try and reach.

  • Indoor Bowling | Try bowling as one activity for teaching kids about improving over time. Keep a card where you track your child’s score so they can see their improvement.

Look for Activities Where Kids Can Win Often

Many activities for kids allow for there to be new winners often. With games like these, you have the perfect opportunity to help reinforce positive messages about competition. Some games, like Blocks Rock!, give kids a chance to win an interaction with every new flip of a card. Some other suggestions for these types of games include:

  • Hide and Seek | In hide and seek, a child can win in each round! 

  • Tag | Tag is another classic game where there ‘winner’ is always changing, and it only ends when everyone is too tired to play anymore!

  • Card Games | Card games like Go Fish give kids the opportunity to celebrate little victories throughout the game.

An Activity That Has It All…

You can help your children learn about healthy competition through almost any activity they do, however, Blocks Rock! gives you the perfect opportunity to help kids grow in this area. Blocks Rock!’s gameplay allows for kids to measure their improvement, win often, and can be played collaboratively with the free 3D Companion App. We’ve seen children high-five, chant each other’s name, and embrace a healthy competitive spirit through playing.