Inside: Ideas for educational games for preschoolers and educational games for elementary kids. These are brain development activities for kids that also boost personality, character, and language development.
Aside from being fun, educational games are serious business because they are beneficial to the health and development of your child. Hopscotch, peek-a-boo, hide-and-seek, and pat-a-cake are some of the types of play that enrich your kid’s body, brain, and life. Playing with parents and other children is essential to building bodies, brains, and social bonds. Play helps your child improve their abilities and regulate their emotions.
Combining Different Types of Play
Object and Toys Play
Giving your little child toys is beneficial to developing their sensory-motor skills. Preschool-age kids can use objects to form concepts and abstract thoughts like symbolism. For instance, they may use a banana as a phone.
Physical Play
Physical play can develop your kid’s motor skills, build emotional intelligence, and prevent childhood obesity. For example, sliding on a playground slide can boost their confidence as they learn to be risk-takers in a safe environment. Playing tag with other children can develop their socio-emotional skills such as empathy.
Outdoor Play
Playing outdoors is equally significant because children learn to use their senses for skills development, such as balance and spatial awareness. It can also improve their attention span.
Pretend Play
Role-playing helps your kid experiment and learn to cooperate. Make-believe, imaginary play, and dress-up encourage them to be creative. Moreover, they build language, communication, and negotiation skills through this type of activity.
You can provide your child with plenty of play opportunities to help them become happy, healthy, creative, and curious. Play a game or two with two to share their joy of discovery as you bond with them.
Games Children Can Play at Home
If you are at your wit’s end trying to figure out which games are suitable for your little one, you can check the list below:
Games for 3-5 Years Old
Practice Writing
Your child must learn to write because they will use it throughout their life. Aside from using pencil and paper, you may use Play-Doh to shape letters or trace letters and connect the dots. You can also encourage your preschooler to improve their penmanship with sensory activities like forming letters in a salt tray.
Enhance Musical Skills
You may have had “The Itsy, Bitsy Spider” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a constant loop when your child was a baby. Now that they are preschoolers, you can add more musical activities to instill a love of music. You may create your musical instruments by attaching bells to a paper plate to make a tambourine. You can have fun music classes or play musical games.
Try Gardening
Gardening can teach lessons about patience, nutrition, and science. It helps your preschooler learn how a plant thrives. You can also get him excited to eat the vegetables he tended. Your young child can also study the scientific names of plants.
Play Jigsaw Puzzles
Your child can develop fine motor skills while moving the puzzle pieces and putting them in the correct spots. You may buy puzzles with pegs to help those little hands use them quickly. You also teach your kid patience, an essential virtue at all stages in life.
Games for 5-7 Years Old
This Nintendo Switch puzzle game is the continuation of BoxBoy! on the Nintendo 3DS. Your child controls a tiny, animated box character to create and drop copies of itself to bypass and overcome obstacles. It has a gradual difficulty curve and informative tutorials. It reinforces problem-solving, critical thinking skills, and teamwork because they can play together with you or a friend.
This conservation-themed adventure game is family-friendly for Apple Arcade. It focuses on conserving wildlife and exploration but reinforces the themes of community, respect, and friendship. If you want to catch your kid’s attention, you can allow them to play this short game. It is an enjoyable game that also teaches about respecting the world around them.
Thirteen and a Half Cats
This game is free-to-play for Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android platforms and is appropriate for children from five years old and older. Your child may need help with the reading parts, especially if they are learning to read unaided. The objective of the game is to search for cats using the spells given by a witch. The nameless witch girl in the game will discover something about herself and the mysterious witch who helped her.
Thirteen and a Half Cats help your children practice and improve their organization skills because they must arrange and coordinate materials to complete the tasks. They also learn to focus on the mission, which is to rescue the 13 cats.
Final Thoughts
Games help your young child learn virtues that are useful in all stages of life. As a parent, you select the type of play that you believe can assist your kid in developing such virtues and skills. You may also make it a family activity to build a stronger bond.
Author Bio
Opal Miyamoto is an accomplished American blogger and freelancer. She communicates well, is very friendly, and provides top-notch service as one of the many academic writers online. She is very accepting of new acquaintances and happy to connect with old friends. Her hobbies include writing, traveling, painting, and cooking.
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