Kids Computer Games Recommendations

Primary Games is an educational site for children. It breaks its games down nicely into many categories including; Math, Science, Language Arts, Social Studies, puzzles, arcade, Top Ten Games and also the Game of the Day. There is also a section where teachers and parents can search for curriculum appropriate games. You can register to have your high scores saved but it is not necessary and this is a free site. They do have ads so as always I issue caution for younger children (who don’t know the dangers of clicking ads and being taken off-site) but the ads did not seem inappropriate. This site has won many awards and I can see why…. Most of these games run using Shockwave, Java or Flash. Here are a few of my favorites:

Super Sleuth — An Original game for ages 8+. Gather evidence and accuse a suspect of the crime. As you wander around you can find material belonging to each of the suspects. When you have 7 items you are sent to the lab and it well tell you how many of those items are valid evidence. You need to use logic to discard a few items and collect others and return to the lab for analyzation to see if you are getting any closer to accusing a suspect. Fun combination of walking around which makes it adventure/arcade like and the lab which you need logic for as well as reading skills.

Balls & Boxes — Ball come out of their boxes and are shuffled. Figure out which boxes the balls came from and place them back. Starts off easy and gets challenging quickly.

Number Balls – A seemingly easy Math game. Numbered balls float around the screen and you click on them in ascending order. There are negative numbers included as well…. Good for kid’s attention and math skills.

Snowy: Puzzle Islands – My favorite game of the site (that I found so far) You are a bear and can move pieces of wood to get to the iceberg and exit to the next level. They have a kids version and a harder version for older kids and adults. Fun and requires logic.

Wonka Vision Illusions is not really a game but rather a look at a bunch of different optical illusions. It is under the Science Category. Being a big fan of optical illusions makes this a fun activity to look at with my kids.

Letter Blocks — There are a bunch of letter blocks and similar to a collapse game that you have to remove before they pile up. The difference is you have to make words to have them collapse instead of matching colors. This will get kids brains working as they try and think of as many words as they can quickly….

Lemonade Stand — Set price, recipe and buy ingredients to make your own lemonade stand. Pay attention to the weather and what your customers like to make as much money as you can in 30 days. Fun game and will teach kids reasoning as well as how much goes into running even a small business like a lemonade stand.

Oh I long for the days of endless time where I can play games all day when I come across a site such as this one. I can guesstimate this site has a few hundred games and so many of them look like so much fun. Primary Games is a great site for kids to play some educational games and some arcade ones as well. There are games here for everyone whether it’s puzzlers, logic, arcade, math, science, hidden object or any other kind of game you can imagine. Go check out Primary Games and find some games for everyone in the family — just be prepared to stay a while!