There are many fun educational games that kids can play to develop their growing minds. As educators, it is our responsibility to provide opportunities for them to play games using their cognitive skills and their physical skills. Making their everyday activities into games is a great way to enhance their learning.
At the age of 5-6 year olds, children are very curious about their world. So, as a teacher or a guardian, it is important to use that energy of the child and point them towards directions and material that they’ll start learning naturally. For example, a child is interested in seeing the plants in the home garden. Tell the child to water a particular set of plants and take care of them. This way they understand plants need water and sunlight to grow big and better.
In the list below, we try to list a set of useful games for 5-6 year olds to play.
- Story Dice
It is a soft dice with each face showing a different image or action. The challenge is to create a story that links all the images together. You might have to be extremely creative to make up stories on saving a city from raining pizzas using paper! Story dice are a fantastic way to spark engagement, creativity, and language skills in children and to break the ice among people.
- Treasure Hunts
You can play a treasure hunt indoors or outdoors, but an outdoor treasure hunt plan is more adventurous for kids to explore and play. You need a treasure to hide and you need a set of clues written to be the directions. For example, you might decide to hide the treasure in a box and keep that box in a shoe. Or you could hide it under a tree in the outdoor garden.
- Simple Puzzles
Simple wooden puzzles are good for kids. They teach problem-solving and improve fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Some of the other puzzle based games that are good for young children are:
- Scrabble – a popular word game
- Pictionary – a drawing guessing game
- Taboo – very good to improve vocabulary
- 50 pieces or more puzzle – will test the child’s patience
- Checkers – an old strategy game
4. Color and Shape Matching Games
These are games where children match colors and shapes, helping them recognize different visual elements. For example, a simple game might have cards with various shapes and colors, and kids can fit them in the right holes or indentations.
5. Music and Movement Games
Games that combine music with actions such as ‘Simon Says‘ with dancing or jumping are great for motor skills. They can help a child gain pattern based learning and rhythm based learning, enhancing their overall intuition.
6. Math based puzzles
Hands on math toys such as Rubik’s cube or number puzzles to develop interest in math and numeric thinking.
7. Cooking Together
Cooking together is a game. Talking about various ingredients and how to understand flavor mixes, measurements, and fractions is a good exercise for visual thinking. And, of all, it teaches that you’ve to work hard to make a delicious meal.
Hope this is useful, thank you.
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