HYPOTHESIS: you can teach cooperative play through running certain scenarios with your kids.
PROCEDURE: For Superhero adventure this month I was thinking we might have our homemade costumes ready, but the sewing still has to be done. So we just went forward with what we had, and Lyric wanted to be Robin while Zephyr made up the mysterious Mister Y. I wanted to tell Zephyr that Mister E might be a better way to hit that pun, but thought better of it... His using a Y at the end probably signifies some new level of reading understanding, why get in the way of that?
I constructed 4 "gates" and placed them around my living room.
Post it notes would've worked too, but tape and paper worked fine.
The idea here was to give them various gates they'd have to cover as I called them out, and since they wouldn't be able to reach more than one on their own, I could make them work together. It would be kind of like a cooperative game of "ship to shore", where the kids would race to carry out an order but they had to work together.
Lyric wanted to run a scenario with zombies on balloons, so I indulged him and said I was Brother Blood and I was calling in zombies from dimensional gateways. As I called out two numbers, the boys would indeed direct each other over to the right place. We'd pretend to fight off the zombies for a few seconds, then I would give them another countdaown to get to the right gate. I think 4 gates might have been too few, there were a few times I realized they could just stay at the number they were on rather than leave. Next time I'll try 8 gates.
RESULTS: the kids did end up working together and seemed to have a great time doing it. I think the format is very promising as a Nuclear Submarine, I'm excited to try building on it.
Superhero Adventure is always popular with Lyric, it's kind of what he wishes he could be doing all the time. In giving him that, I gotta call this a success.