Best Games for Preschoolers That Actually Teach | Gameschooling Preschool Made Simple

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Wild Outline. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be the best games to play with your preschooler. Last week, I shared the best books to read with your preschooler, so if you missed that video, I will link it up here for you. In the week before that, I talked about what I would do differently if I could start homeschooling preschool from the beginning, like if I could start all over, the things that I would do differently and the things that I think I kind of did right. So I will also link that video for you. In that video, one of the things that I said is that I wish we played more games, and not only did I wish we played more games, I wish I had found some of these games I'm going to be sharing with you earlier so we could have enjoyed them more in the preschool years. We loved every one of these games. We played them a lot when Emily was younger, but I really, really wish I could have implemented them more when she was in preschool because I really didn't even know they existed yet. We hadn't entered the world of game schooling until she was like in kindergarten. So I feel like we didn't get to use them as much as I would have liked. So I'm going to share our top 15 favorite games for the preschool years, and then you'll have to let me know in the comments if you have any that you would like to add. So the first few that I'm going to share are favorites because they all have some sort of like grabber type of thing that helps with fine motor skills, plus they teach other skills along the way, but I loved that specifically about it. So the first one we have is Noodle Knockout, which is literally a fine motor skill game, but it's also dealing with colors because you spin the spinner, you land on a color, so they have to use their little chopsticks to pull that color out to place the noodle orders or to complete the noodle orders basically. So you're kind of dealing with the different colors and the different lengths of noodles. So we're talking about sizes and colors, and they're working on that fine motor grip. It really is a fantastic game. Next up, we have three of my absolute favorites that happen to all be by Educational Insights. The first one is Sneaky Snacky Squirrel. This one in particular is colors, and again, we're using that. The squirrel itself right here, if you can see, is like a grabber, so you're using him to grab the acorns. We have Frida's Fruit Fiesta, which deals with the alphabet. And again, we have Frida, who is a grabber, and you use her to grab the alphabet letters. And then last but not least in that line, we have Shelby's Snack Shack, and he deals with numbers, and he is an adorable little puppy, and you're going to use him to pick up the bones that you are counting. So that way you're developing, between those three Educational Insights, you're dealing with colors, with letters, with numbers, and you're doing, again, like I said, those fine motor skills, which are absolutely fantastic. I have two other alphabet, oh no, I'm sorry, three, three other alphabet games. The first one is Alphabet Island. This is a letters and sound game. The shark basically loves to eat the letters. Then we have a simple alphabet Go Fish, which is just a matching card game. So what I like is that you can play this as Go Fish, but I think you can also kind of play it as a memory where you can flip them over and try to use them as like memory match kind of thing. And then we have Pop for Letters. I just like this because it's small and it's fun, it's basically little pieces of popcorn, and so you're, you know, using that as lowercase letters and uppercase letters so you can address both of those. Just a fun, quick play game. Then not necessarily a alphabet game, but I do think it is like an early reading game. We have Zingo Bingo. So it is, the Zingo little machine spits out, here I'll flip it over so you can see better, it spits out the different pictures with words, and then, so it's just bingo, but it's like an interactive bingo, and because it has the picture and the words, it's an early learning game. Zingo itself is so much fun, and I love the basic one, but I also love that there is a Zingo 1-2-3, which is numbers. What I think is even cooler about this is that there's two levels of play, so when you do the little Zingo, you can match the number two, I don't know if you can see the boards on here, but you can either match it to like the actual representation of the two, so you're not just matching it, you're knowing that the number two means two things, which is great, and then there's also one later when they get a little bit older, which is addition. So it has like three cars plus three cars, and you would need to know that that's six. So it's not just number matching, it's number sense, you know that the number two means two things. So I really, really like that, and then again, it's more fun than regular bingo because it's interactive because it's spinning that little thing out. Then we have some cooperative games. Now I love cooperative games for all ages, but I really love them for younger kids in preschool because they haven't quite learned how to lose graciously yet. So because of that, cooperative games are great because it basically means that you are playing to either, you're playing together to either beat the game or lose against the game. Hopefully you're playing together to beat it, but you're either all winning together or you're all losing together and you have a common enemy, which is the game itself. So we have Hoot Al Hoot, which essentially is a cooperative game that is color based. So you're using your color skills for this one. And then we have Count Your Chickens, which is a cooperative game that is farm and number skills. So you're doing a lot of counting, but it's adorable and you can talk about the farm animals. Then we have Snug as a Bug in a Rug. And in this one, we are dealing with numbers and colors and even some shapes because when you spin here, you can see that it overlaps with colors, shapes, and numbers. So there are six colors, four numbers, and four shapes. Oh, I'm sorry. And then you also have little and big because there's little ones and big ones. So you're using all of those skills to help the little bugs get snug underneath the rug. So that is basically what you're doing here. But again, it's counting colors and shapes, but it's cooperative. So you're all playing together. We also have a kind of figure it out, logic, critical thinking, cooperative game. And that is Outfoxed. If you've ever played Clue, it's kind of similar to Clue in the sense that you have a fox that is a thief. He stole the pie and you're going around figuring out, does this suspect match the things that we have? But it's things like, do they have an umbrella? Are they wearing a necklace? And you're trying to figure out who out of all these foxes is the thief. So it's a much more like younger preschool version of Clue essentially. But I will say it is a lot of fun. We played this just recently because when I pulled it out, Emily was like, I forgot we had that. She won't let me get rid of it. Even at 13, she still thinks it's fun. The last two games that I have are just really, really fun games. One is Sequence for Kids. There is no reading required, so this is a really, really great game. If you're just starting an early preschool game, because they don't have to know how to read, it's just a fun game. You are basically going to draw cards and match them and put little discs down. It's essentially a bingo style game, but you're all playing on the same board and you're just trying to get a sequence of your little chips. So you're just trying to get, I think it's four in a row, yeah, four in a row. And there's things that you can do to move your opponent's card or chip off. And so it's an advanced version of bingo. But it's a lot of fun and it's a really great game to get started in the world of gaming with kids. Because like I said, there's no reading required. It's easy to pick up and play. You can play with two to four players and it's really great. The other one is Spot It. I saved this for last because it's hands down our favorite game. It was hands down our favorite game when she was four. It's hands down our favorite game now that she's 13. I personally grabbed the animal version for preschool because I feel like it's a great way to start introducing animals and to match them. What I love about the Spot It's in general is there's no reading required. So basically you're just trying to find the match on the cards. That's it. So for example, there's a dog on this card, there's a dog on that card. That's all you're trying to do. And the two cards will only ever have one match. There will only ever be one image that overlaps. But like I said, I grabbed animals because I felt like it was kind of the one thing we weren't doing for the preschool years. We have letters. We have numbers. We have shapes. We had colors. We had all kinds of other critical thinking. This is fantastic for critical thinking. It's great for their visual discrimination. It's great for so many things, but then I thought, well, we'll just grab animals so that we're also doing animals, which is another thing that I think preschoolers should be getting familiar with. But that being said, there are so many different versions of Spot It and any of them would be fantastic for preschool because all of them are just matching images. So there's a Marvel. So if you have a preschooler who's obsessed with the Marvel superhero characters, grab that one. There's a Disney princess. There's Frozen. So there's a bluey one I just got for my niece and nephew. So if you have kids that are obsessed with that specific one, it works just as well. There's not anything about animals that's better than the others. I just thought that was the one thing we didn't address in any of the other games. So that's the one I grabbed. But any of the Spot It's would be fantastic for preschool. Now what I did when Emily was younger, because the way we play is we each get a set of cards. We like even the deck out and we try to speed through the matches. I never could figure out how to slow things down and be fair because when Emily was younger, we've never let her win. That's not that's not who we are. Like if you're going to win a game, you're going to win it. We're not let her win just to let her win, but I'm much faster than she was when she was four. So what I would do is I would deal one card to her, two cards to me. So essentially my stack would be twice as thick as hers. She knows now, but at the time she didn't think anything of it. And we would play and it would put us more on even footing when it came to spot it. And then eventually I would do, you know, one to her, two to me, one to her, one to me, and kind of then my stack was one and a half times. Now, I'm pretty sure I could flip it the other way and give her double. And she would probably still beat me because she's gotten really, really good at it. But by the time she was about six and a half, seven, we were easily on even foot and we've never had to deal it that way again, but she knows that that's how we did it. And when she plays with somebody who's younger than her, she sneaky deals the same way because it makes it to where you're not trying to like dumb yourself down for lack of a better way to put it. And you can still play on even footing. That's one of the things I really like about spot it is that again, they don't have to read. They don't have to have knowledge going in. And there's an easy way to get you like on even footing by just giving you a little more cards. So those are my top recommendations for games for you to play with your preschoolers. Now again, I just want to say you can just play games. You don't need to do anything extra. If you're reading some of the books that I talked about last week and you're playing some of these games that I talked about this week, you're doing more than enough. Your preschooler is off to a great start. And before you go, if you're homeschooling a preschooler this year, I'm doing a giveaway. You're not going to want to miss. I'm giving away everything you need for preschool books, games, hands-on resources, and even purposeful preschool. So if you've been wondering how to make preschool simple, fun, and actually work, this is the easiest way to get started. Check the link below in the description to enter for a chance to win.