Category: Kids Puzzles and Activities

All of us cherish toys for kids and watch the way small children play with them. The wooden toys were the most popular years ago and they are still favored by many. From a wooden top to a Nutcracker toy, they have always marked an impression on children. However, with time the wooden toys have given way to the new-sophisticated toys for kids that use the latest technology and mostly runs on batteries.

The turn of 20th century witnessed a booming toy industry, with ever-favorite toys for kids such as the Lincoln Logs. With the new toys, kids could build virtually anything they wanted. The toys were no more restricted to the function of playing, rather they had assumed the role of educating. The kids could build houses, skyscrapers, cabins and more according to their ideas of construction with the Lincoln Logs.

Which are the best toys for kids?

The mini-models, dolls, cars, and other playthings have undergone significant changes in quality over the years, with manufacturers striving to offer excellence to the consumers. The beautiful dollhouses made of wood and the Tonmka trucks made of metal found earlier have given way to plastic replicas. So, while choosing toys for kids you should consider certain priorities such as quality, safety and usefulness.

Especially, for the toddlers between one to three years it is important to focus on the physical play. The toys chosen for toddlers can be of both types outdoors and indoors. Among the outdoors you can choose the wagons, ride-on toys, balls etc, whereas the indoors stuffs include stacking, building blocks and sorting toys which help in developing muscle control.

You can also buy the toys for kids, which allow them to use their imagination. The Play Doh, Legos, art supplies, and crafts may help them hone their creativity. Apart from these, an essential thing that you must consider is the safety of your child. Avoid playthings with small parts that can be swallowed or could be broken off easily. You can search the Internet to discover toys with best and safest features.

To get the children acquainted with their environment, you can buy them housekeeping tools, kitchen sets, toy bikes or cars that they would enjoy to play and work with them. Moreover, the large board puzzles with vibrant colors are amazing tools for playing as well as learning at the same time. The parents willing to actively participate with their child can buy advanced toys for kids to comply with their learning potential.

Educational toys for kids

These are the modern toys designed to teach the kids a particular subject matter such as Math or Science. The proliferating demand for educational toys has compelled the toy manufacturers to make greater efforts for innovations that would make the process of learning easier.

Of course the most popular toys for kids are those dealing with science. These develop a curiosity among children to explore new avenues. Some of the sought-after educational toys are microscopes, dioramas, binoculars, robotic sets, electronic devices, insect and bug habitats and others.

You must look forward to purchase toys that introduce new skills for your child. However, apart from being educational the toys for kids must also be safe, and fun to play.

Brainteaser is a problem in the form of a riddle. Solving such problems normally requires a lot of conventional thinking. Sometimes riddles and brain teasers really require ‘out of the box’ thinking.

Brain teasers often tease the human mind for its faulty reasoning, especially in problems of conditional probability. The conventional mind treats it as a problem of absolute probability. The difficulty one experiences in solving a brain teaser is a function of such thinking. An example of such thinking is well illustrated in this problem:

Someone has two children. Given that at least one of them is a boy, what is the probability that the other child would also be a boy? Simpler minds would think they are being asked to find the absolute probability of the second child being a boy. Since the probability of being a boy or girl is equal, the answer they would give is ½, which, as will be shown, is wrong.

For any couple with two children there are only 4 possibilities, considering that the probability of birth of a boy or a girl is same. These are:

1. 2 boys
2. 2 girls
3. first boy then girl
4. first girl then boy

Since in this problem, at least one is a boy, the second possibility ie. 2 girls, is eliminated. So there are just 3 possibilities out of which we are interested only in the first event, which is two boys. The correct answer is therefore 1/3. This approach avoids the error in the first approach in treating the births of the two children as independent events in all the 4 possibilities. In the correct approach once a girl is born first, the probability of a second girl being born is nil. Put differently, the probability of a second child being a girl or a boy is equal only when the first child is a boy.

Brain teasers have become a popular way of passing time among people of all ages. It is now becoming a necessary event in many parties or social gatherings since they enliven the proceedings. It has been seen that even the snooty, aloof types fall a prey to its seductive appeal to the brain. There are now brain teasers of all kinds to suit all tastes and styles with varying degrees of difficulty. There are the simpler ones which take a few minutes to solve and there are the complicated ones taking hours to solve. Many parties thrown by the fans of brain teasers have acquired certain fame only for their brain teaser party games. Next time you throw a party make sure to include brain teaser games.

Mental exercises like brainteasers are a good thing anywhere even in parties, especially those where things sometimes get out of hand. Intelligent hosts by including such riddles and brain teasers in their parties could perhaps make such get-togethers les rowdy than they normally are.

Songs for kids are composed in a way to convey education and entertainment, for the child’s interest. Action songs are very much prevalent in the kindergarten schools, which indulge in nursery rhymes turned in to melodious songs. It is the intellectual way of teaching culture, good manners, facts and fictions.

Songs for kids Bring Magical Effects

Music plays magically in to the ears of the innocent kids. They respond instantly and jump to the thrill of the melodious voices. For them, the experience is unique and their tender minds get immersed in to the sea of the melodious tunes. Instead of taking arduous and boring classes for the children, it is the best way of imparting teachings through songs for kids.

Take your kid to the Wiggle’s concert and see the magic in your kid’s eyes. The way the Wiggles wriggle their bodies and sway to the tunes, are treat to the eyes! Even if your kid is a toddler, watch them shake their legs and arms and murmur a few words from the songs. Watching your kid performing the songs is truly a sight to behold.

The market is flooded with CDs, DVDs, television shows, which are striving to bring forth the best songs for kids. These songs include Holiday songs, Christmas songs, Halloween songs, Thanksgiving songs, et al. The songs are educational and at the same time produce immense fun for kids.

Music and interaction should be the key words for those cassettes or CDs, containing songs for children. The latest technology is enabling the parents to insert the voice of their children in to the songs, which is adding that extra spark to the whole thrill. While they listen to the music, you can play guitar or other instruments and share your voice with them. Your interaction with them will add to the fun.

The Songs for Kids

Christmas carols are the all time kid’s favorites. Few of the famous songs are ‘Frosty the Snowman’, ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’, ‘Joy to the World’, ‘Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’, ‘Jingle Bells’, ‘Up on the House Top’, ‘O Christmas Tree’, ‘Winter Wonderland’, and many more.

While writing the songs for children, the songwriter tries to study child psychology. Children are very egoist until five years of age. They have very sensitive minds and a power to grip things instantly. Therefore, the songs for kids should be framed in a way, so as to win their hearts and innocent minds.

Children crafts always manage to amaze children. It is crucial that children indulge in some kind of craft activities as it enhances their mental growth and boosts the learning process. They gain better understanding and it adds to their skills as well. And above all, children enjoy to the fullest and extract as much of fun as they can from these crafts. The ample range of lessons that they learn by interacting casually with crafts is very helpful in the long run.

All you need to do is to use visual aids if you are to bring in an easy craft for kids as a schooling tool. This is excellent for cognitive development of children. Make sure that the instructions are precise with loads of actions and words while dealing with easy crafts for kids. This is how you drive away all the confusion in the child’s mind.

The best you can do is to allow the children undertake a lot of practice with easy crafts. When it actually comes to teaching, word building through easy crafts for kids, cutout letters are ideal. Make it a point that you do not involve your kids with excess of workbook tasks and writing as easy children crafts. Try to slot in habitual play involving clay, water and sand to further physical object manipulation.

You will know that crafting helps your kids to mount on their creativity. Not just that exploring newer things and gaining self-confidence on part of your kids are some of the other things in the offering. When it comes to toddlers and preschoolers, coloring and arts right away come to mind. Working out with coloring books and blank paper accompanied by an array of crayons, markers, paints, gel pens and other materials is one of the best ideas. In fact, preschoolers can even use scissors if their projects demand.

If music is on the cards, then go in for the famous shoebox guitar or a shaker ready with a paper towel roll filled with beans. Decorating Christmas tree, making arrangements for the Easter, making cutout snowflakes or jack-o-lanterns, even doing paint-by-number ornaments are some of the things that school-aged crafts suggest. Under the guidance of a parent, kids can even venture into simple sewing for that matter. As for older kids they might as well make candles and soap or even settle for making food gifts all by themselves.

The art of crafting is not only a good means of creative outlet but also establishes clarity of mind. It fosters spatial development and not to mention your child’s sense of color. Let children crafts take your kids to the next level of intelligence.

For once the world is thinking on a single issue and that is the Sudoku puzzle. Scaling dizzying heights of popularity in the puzzle charts, Sudoku puzzles have been likened to the phenomenon that the Rubik Cube was in the 1980s.

Sudoku is actually a logical placement puzzle that tests your reasoning powers along with your patience to see through the end of the game. This riveting puzzle game usually consists a 9×9 grid, further divided into 3×3 subgrids. Some of the cells are supplied with numbers and your aim is to fill up the rest of the cells so that each column, row, and region holds the numbers 1 – 9 exactly once. That is, “single numbers”, as indicated by the name of the puzzle.

But contrary to popular perception, Sudoku puzzles are not mathematical games. The numerals can be substituted by any set of distinctive symbols, say alphabets, shapes or colors. And ESPN’s version of Sudoku has the positions of the baseball field in place of numbers.

The name Sudoku is an abbreviation of the Japanese phrase, “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, which means, “the digits must remain single”. This name has been patented by the Nikoli Co. Ltd. in Japan, a renowned publisher of puzzles. Sudoku is also known as Number Place, which is the original U.S. title, or “Nampure” for short.

Sudoku has an interesting lineage. It is believed that an early version of the puzzle, which came out in a French newspaper in 1895, was actually inspired by the Latin Squares, an immensely popular puzzle devised by the great mathematician Euler. From its inception in print till the First World War, Sudoku has been a popular weekly feature in the newspapers.

The modern form of Sudoku owes its origins to Howard Garns, an architect who also dabbled in puzzle making. Retaining the basic form of Euler’s Latin Squares, Garns added a third dimension (the regional restriction) and presented the puzzle as a partially completed grid. It came out under the title Number Place in the puzzle magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games.

The recent surge in the popularity of the Sudoku puzzles has a Japanese connection. Always on the lookout for some food for thought, the people of Japan went all out for Sudoku around 1986, two years after Nikoli introduced the puzzle in Japan in the paper Monthly Nikolist. The world followed suit and by 2005, Sudoku became one of the most popular puzzles ever played.

These days, the Internet is replete with websites containing free Sudoku puzzles. These online puzzles also come in printable versions for you to download and solve it while waiting for the bus. Quite a few newspapers also carry Sudoku puzzles as weekly or even daily features.

And once you have exhausted these vast resources, you have Sudoku software to create a puzzle for you in a jiffy, thus ensuring that your gray cells are never idle.

The Sudoku puzzle has definitely taken over the world by storm.

Coloring sheets are innovative ways to make kids understand the colors and virtually the difference between unlike shades. Colors are attractive and therefore kids just love to keep themselves occupied with several colorful options. When one is a toddler and not yet able to color within lines still the little one would love to hold the crayons tightly within his / her fingers.

When all coloring pages are filled and your child wants more you can easily go online for some printable coloring pages. Coloring pages can come in all types. Some sheets are quite elaborate, fitting well into the lesson plan while others are available in simple forms with friends from the Disney land or other favorite cartoon characters.

Printable coloring pages have lots to do in coloring competitions where you just need to have a home computer and printer to avail your kid’s contest entry picture. In case you don’t have a computer at home you can just print the pages and let your kid have a wonderful time with colors.

Moreover, a curriculum based on coloring is definitely an educational endeavor. The process acts great in developing hand-eye coordination, picture comprehension and the right notion of colors.

Noisy kids often need something to stay preoccupied and stop messing around annoying the elders aimlessly. Just make them hold a piece of coloring sheet and then see the difference. Your kid can even decorate the coloring sheets using chalk, fabric paint, sequins, feathers and tin foils.

Coloring pages are available in so many varieties. They can be stained glass windows with butterflies and flowers, holiday coloring pages, baking cookies, Easter egg coloring page, Christian Easter coloring page, history sheets for coloring, Temple of Artemis, Rembrandt Painting of a Lady, US Flag and so many things more.

Coloring sheets can also be used as dividers in your notebooks. This will help you keep an account of the amount of work done or the number of pages being read. Color sheets also help a kid have a fixed focus. This way a kid can concentrate more even when there is a commotion around. For preschool children, color pages help building a conception of fixed boundaries. In the beginning, a child may scribble all over the page without showing any respect to boundaries or outlines. However, with age, the child learns the importance of boundaries in a colour sheet and from here, he starts understanding the limitations in life – to what extent he should go and where he should stop in life.

With coloring pages, kids also learn other added activities like using keyboard and mouse, how to log into the Internet and lots of things about search engines.

Finally, it can be stated with conviction that with colors, children learn to grow following a well-defined code of conduct. Working with coloring sheets, help the children beautify their lives with appropriate sense of harmonization and precision.

T-charts are graphic organizers that help students manage and organize their knowledge in respect to the specific features/traits of different items or topics. With the help of a T-chart, a student comes to understand the negatives and positives of an argument. These charts also enable one to evaluate and assess the advantages and disadvantages of a particular decision.

T-charts are keys to itemize the problems and solutions in connection with an action or incident. Such charts help in expressing the strengths and weaknesses of a literary creation. With the help of a T-chart, a student can also produce a persuasive piece of writing in which the student successfully introduces a list of facts and opinions.

Often a T-chart is displayed and effectively utilized as a reference point in the course of classroom activities. Most EF or Explicit Focus lessons generally refer to a T-chart more than a table.

T-chart Based Activities For Learners

As a teacher, when you are out to explore/test your students’ listening skills and competencies, you can have them work with T-charts. A T-chart is simply a table with no box to outline it. A T-chart can be placed both horizontally as well as vertically.

Different T-chart based activities can be planned for students of different age groups. Thus, you can provide your students with a numbers’ T-chart wherein some numbers are missing. Ask the children to find out and fill the missing numbers. You can even have them describe the pattern they followed in establishing the relationship between the numbers to arrive at the missing numbers.

Again, you can plan a T-chart based activity with some errors and mistakes. Ask to identify the errors and rectify them. The students are also asked to describe the method, which they have used in identifying the errors.

A T-chart is a fast decision making tool. It helps one take a decision after discussing and enumerating the advantages as well as the disadvantages of a situation. Such a decision may be like whether to take or keep a pet or how favorable it would be to switch over to a new job.

A T-chart is a perfect way of judging your potentials side by side assessing your surrounding situations and circumstances. T-charts mark your status graphically following a specific system.

Kids arts and crafts are a good way of keeping your kids away from mischief during holidays. Constant monitoring is impossible as they are inventive enough to find ways of venting their wild spirits. It is this innate creativity of the preschoolers and toddlers, which needs channeling into useful activities.

Enroll your darlings in short duration kids arts, crafts and creative courses where they are taught to use their minds to generate innovative ideas. For kids arts and craft are mainly about ideas. The concept of kids arts and crafts is based on providing the child with a stimuli which they find interesting and challenging and not boring or difficult to understand.

They will learn how to make new things out of things commonly found in the house. This would encourage them since a sense of achievement is attached to creating new things.

These courses can go further than that. Such activities can enhance their creative thinking and learning abilities, skills that would stand them in good stead in the future at any age. At the end of the day it should be all about play, fun and enjoyment for children while at the same time fostering their personal growth.

Points to remember

Don’t give the kids any objects to create. Kids lack the foresight to see what they would be making. Focus more on the play and experimentation that leads to the creation. All their senses should be involved to give them new sensory experiences and help them learn about causal relationships.

Use concrete props and visual aids as teaching tools to develop their cognitive skills and for clearer understanding.

Keep your instructions short and use plenty of action and words. Select a student from the class who can demonstrate to the kids what you have instructed and be able to act out the scenario you are trying to present.

Avoid discussions on topics and people or using objects they are not familiar. To make it easy for the kids keep the topics and objects within their range of experiences.

Avoid too much use of workbooks and writing. Allow them full play using clay water and sand to encourage physical manipulation.

Discuss with the kids the sensations felt while manipulating these objects. Such crafts will give the children a chance to move towards the two-way logic needed in the next stage of development.

It is necessary that you take the children for field trips and discuss with them what they are eating and tasting, drinking and seeing.

Ideas for children’s arts, crafts and other creative things

There are a plethora of ideas, which include making paper toys, collage, spray painting, drawing and candle making. They can be taught to make cute wall hangings, fleece pillows and jewelry boxes. Even basic skills like sewing and knitting can be taught in kids arts, crafts and painting classes.