Family dinners are associated with happier, healthier family members. These games encourage families to eat at the dinner table together.

Family meals are an important party of healthy living. They offer quality family time together, routine and consistency and are associated with the following benefits:

• Healthier eating habits
• Happier family members
• Open communication channels between parents and children
• Children who grow up eating frequent family dinners are less likely to become dependant on alcohol, tobacco and drugs than those who have infrequent family dinners together.

Below are 5 games to make family meal time fun, entertaining and memorable.

1. Create a story

Prepare for fits of giggles with this game. Each family member contributes one, two or three words to a quick, one sentence story.

• Choose the criteria for the story and the order in which the criteria word will be shouted out. For example, place, time of day, character, verb, adjective etc. It depends on the size of your family as to how many criteria are required.
• Allocate each family member 1 criteria and agree on an order in which the word for the criteria will be shouted out.
• Once the criteria are allocated, each family member must select a word or words for those criteria and keep it secret. For example for place you can choose "in the garden" or "on Planet Zorba". For character you can choose, "monkey" or "hedgehog". For time of day you can choose, "in the morning" or "twilight". And so on.
• Once each family member has silently chosen their word or words and they understand the order of each family member's turn for example 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc, you are ready to go.
• One family member says go and each family member shouts out their word or words one after the other in the correct order. Your story could go something like this: The hedgehog (character first) jumped (verb second) on planet Zorba (place third) at sunrise (time of day fourth).
• After each round or story, you can rotate the criteria so everyone gets a chance to select a word from each criteria.

Let your imagination go wild!

2. Memory games

I went to the grocery store to buy a ....... OR In my suitcase I packed for my holiday a ….. OR The president's cat was a......

In this game you have to remember the words that each family has chosen. If you forgot a word or say any words out of order, you are out. The winner is the family member who remembers all the words in the correct order last.

• Select the theme of the memory game, see examples above.
• Decide who is going to start.
• Here is an example of how The president's cat theme is played using adjectives.
  Mom starts. Mom says: "The president's cat was a despicable cat." Daughter goes second. Daughter says: "The president's cat was a despicable and a curious cat." Son goes third. Son says: "The president's cat was a despicable cat, a curious cat and a fat cat."
• Keep going round the table with each family member taking a turn to remember all the words already said and adding on a new one. If a family member forgets a word or gets the order wrong he or she is out. Keep going until all the family members but 1 are out.

3. These are a few of my favourite things

A wonderful game that helps family members get to know each other better. Each person at the dinner table names five of their favourite things. For example, favourite colour, number, tv show, movies, animal, friend, toy, food, book. The following evening you can test your memories and see if you can remember the 5 favourite things that all the family members told you the previous evening!

4. Question game

A brilliant game that teaches you to ask the right questions, tests your memory, improves your general knowledge and listening skills.

• One family member thinks of an animal, song or movie and the other family members have to guess what it is by asking questions about it.
• Here is an example of how the animal one plays out.
• A family member thinks of an animal, let's say a lemur. The family member says: "I have an animal on my mind."
• The other family members each have a turn to ask questions. Useful questions can be: "Does it live on land or in water?" or "Is it a herbivore or a carnivore?" or "Does it have two or four legs?"
• The family member who quesses correctly goes next.

5. Secret socks

A family member hides an object in a sock and each family member has to take a turn guessing what it is. Each person has a turn to hide a secret object in the sock. For older children they can come up with an interesting fact about the object or make up a story about the object to give clues.

Published: 15 July 2011