Puzzles and Games for Kids

Argh the Summer holidays drag on. In a previous life, I was a teacher, and there was no issue with childcare in the Summer holidays - I was the childcare! These days, sorting out who is doing what in the Summer hols is a major head ache, and a costly one too! Working from home, there is some flexibility around having the kids around when I'm working for bits and pieces, but it's not fair to them or me to have them around the house for long periods - thank god for grandparents! However, Friday is a non working day for me, and we're always looking for new things to do. This morning, we popped to Ilkley to buy some school shoes and now we're back for a bit of a rest before some swimming later this afternoon, so why not spend some time on something educational in the mean time!

We tried out this cool new website called Puzzles and Games for Kids, the idea being that children spend time independently solving jigsaws to help with hand eye co-ordination, fine motor skills and general problem solving - my five year old loved it! There are a variety of different puzzles to complete, and the best thing is they can be differentiated according to your child's age/ability. Makes learning fun too - brilliant!

Here's what we did...

We started off by clicking on "Choose File" and actually imported our own photo to make into a jigsaw! Here you can see my five year old moving the pieces around - it was just the right level of trickyness for him, but I could have clicked on 5x5 to make it that bit harder...

As well as importing your own photos to turn into jigsaw, you can choose the pre-made images as well, which are very age appropriate and appealing. Here you can see a jigsaw that might be more appropriate for an older child in the 5x5 format.

The whole selection of puzzle with more to come I'm sure!

It was actually a really good motivator for getting my son used to using a mouse - though these games can also be used on mobile devices and best of all, are free! Great news.

What online games do you recommend for those "down time" moments in the holidays?