With the school holidays fast approaching (aren’t they always?) it’s important to have some tricks up your sleeve for keeping the kids busy.
As known skin flint and a keen budgeter, I like things that entertain my kids for free or cheaply. We don’t go out every day during the school breaks to try and keep costs to a minimum.
I also don’t mind a bit of screentime.
In fact, I welcome screentime, providing they’re not wasting the day on their tablet or whatever. A bit of quiet downtime in front of the iPad never hurt anybody.
I was even more happy with screentime when I found a bunch of free educational games that are heaps of fun! These are my top picks from the website:
Liquid Sort
My kids love reasoning games, and I love that they play them because I think it keeps their minds sharp. This liquid sorting game is very popular in our house. The game involves quite a basic concept of sorting the liquids into one colour test in a single tube. To do this, you have to pour some liquid in another test tube and shuffle them about to get the end result.
It doesn’t sound very hard, and I’ll admit it starts off easy, but it does get more difficult and becomes quite a puzzle! I like watching my kids figure it out, have fun and keep their brains active!
If you’re looking at getting out and about in Derbyshire, you’ll love this site Ey Up.
3D Mahjong
Mahjong is always a favourite. It’s such a good puzzle game and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love it. We enjoy this 3D version of Mahjong to get our brains working extra hard. I say we, and it is really all of us that love this one.
My 9 year old is a fan of these puzzles, but I’m partial to a but of Mahjong myself. It’s great to kick back and unwind with a game of Mahjong, I swear it brings my blood pressure right down and really helps me chill!
If you like Mahjong, I definitely recommend this version.
Word Search
Word searches are the ultimate oldschool puzzles. I remember when I was a kid, if we ever had a substitute teacher, they’d always bring a wordsearch and it would be my absolute favourite. My kids love a word search too. It’s funny, because when you’re doing it at school, you feel like you’re beating the system because you’re not doing work, but in reality, it’s helping work on your literacy.
When you get your kids onto doing word searches at home, it has the same effect. They don’t realise they’re learning and improving their reading and spelling – they just think they’re having a fun time working on a puzzle.
In my opinion, the best educational games are the ones where the kids don’t realise they’re getting an education at all!
So if you’ve got a school holiday coming up (or even a rainy day) and you’ve not given your kids any screen time yet, get them on these games. There are way more to choose from that just what I’ve shown here, they even have Tetris style games too. Well worth distracting your kids with these free puzzle games and keeping their minds active.