Wherever you may go this summer (car, train, airplane, restaurant, Grandma's house, campsite or hotel) these printable games just require a bit of planning to print out a stack of them before you leave. Be sure to give them a once over before heading out the door, however, as some require pencil or crayons and others need dice or scissors.
ABCTeach has both free and membership-required printables. On most of their pages, you'll find the free resources at the top of the page, with the paid ones below. The printable games include coloring pages, crossword puzzles, dot to dot, word searches, printable crafts, folder games, printable dominoes, and (whew!) many more. I particularly liked the puzzles, which include Sudoku, mazes, number puzzles and tangrams (a geometric jigsaw-style puzzle that you print and cut.)
Highlights of the printable game collection from British site Activity Village include the classic Battleship game, memory matching games in a variety of themes, dominoes, file folder games and a few dice games such as Mountain, Skeleton, and What's Your Number? Mountain is ideal for young players because of its simplicity, but has variations for older kids as well. You'll find more games by following the "More Educational Games" or "Kids Games and Activities" links at the bottom of the page.
While some of these are worksheets, there are plenty of printables at Dr. Mike's that do qualify as games. Here are two that caught my eye. Challenging Math Puzzle is a grid of eight cells. "All you have to do is arrange the numbers 1 through to 8 in the grid shown. The rules? No consecutive numbers should be next to each other, either horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Sounds simple? Have a go!" Traffic Jam is a printable version of the Rush Hour board game, where the object is to drive the red car off the top of the board (without hitting any other cars.)
Dominoes, rummy games, Uno, board games, memory games and bingo games dominate at Belinda Mooney's Suite 101 Kids Crafts site. Her speciality is taking each of these familiar games and theming it with a motif such as dinosaurs, butterflies, or pirates. She also has quite a few games based on books such as "Charlotte's Web", "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie" and "Froggy Gets Dressed".
The brightly colored Kidz Page has oodles of easy printable word games (word searches, crossword puzzles, mixed-up word scrambles), mazes, and Sudoku puzzles. Coloring pages are filed separately. Look for the link at the bottom of the page. I liked the word square and word box puzzles (fill in the grid with missing vowels so that each column and row contains a real word) because I had not seen them before. They also have a unique collection of twenty-six people name word searches. "If you can't find your own name, maybe you'll find one of your friends!"
Buy Printable Games Printable for $2.00
or try a FREE trial of the Printables ClubThe following links are either new discoveries or sites that didn't make it into my newspaper column because of space constraints. Enjoy!
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