Free Nursery Rhyme Games
Nursery rhymes provide opportunities for children to develop auditory, language and cognitive skills, such as rhythm and rhyme discrimination and concepts about numbers. Joining in with songs enables pronunciation practice and helps children acquire new vocabulary. Nursery rhymes with actions help children to develop gross motor skills, such as skipping and marching, and fine motor skills, such as finger-counting and hand-clapping. Nursery rhymes also stimulate children's imaginations with their lively and humorous characters and scenarios. Children can learn nursery rhymes and associated skills by playing free online games. Share and enjoy the games with your child to help build positive relationships and to support skills development.
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Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme Games
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The Mother Goose website features free games from nursery rhymes such as "Georgie Porgie," "Pat-a-Cake" and "Humpty Dumpty." Children enter each game by clicking on the picture of their chosen rhyme. The games vary in difficulty, but all contain clear instructions and support the development of skills such as memory, matching and counting. For example, if you click on the mom and baby picture that illustrates the simple "Pat-a-Cake" game, you reach instructions for patting and pricking a cake and marking it with "B." Each action includes sound effects. Click on the "Play" button to find the image of a large cake. Drag a hand from the side of the cake to "pat" the cake and a fork to "prick" it and to produce groups of colorful sparkles. When you drag the letter "B" onto the cake, the word "Baby" appears. Click the "Hot" button to watch the cake "cook" in the flames of an imaginary oven.
CBeebies Nursery Rhymes Collage Maker
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The CBeebies website features games from three nursery rhymes: "Hey Diddle Diddle," "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" and "Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross." A child's voice introduces the title of each rhyme for easy identification and sings the chosen nursery rhyme when you click the "Play" button. The game stimulates children's creative imaginations as they drag comical illustrations of nursery rhyme characters onto a background to watch the outcomes and to listen to the humorous sound effects. For example, in the "Hey Diddle Diddle" rhyme, children can drag characters and objects, such as the cat, the fiddle and the cow, onto a background that suggests field and sky. Place characters and objects next to each other to watch them react. For example, if you place the dog and cat together, they bark and meow.
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National Grid for Learning Resource Pack
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The National Grid for Learning provides a resource pack of free educational games that feature rhymes such as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," "The Grand Old Duke of York" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep." The "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" games enable practice of counting and ordering numbers. Children try to "catch" the falling stars by clicking on a star as it falls. With each catch, the number of stars appears as a numeral at the side of the game. Children can also drag a jumbled set of stars that are numbered 1 to 5 into the correct order by placing them into blank star shapes on the screen. Sound effects help children to monitor their successes during the games.
First-School Online Jigsaw Puzzles
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The First-School website features free educational games, such as the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" online jigsaw puzzle. Jisgaw puzzles help children to practice and develop skills, such as careful observation and spatial awareness, and to acquire new vocabulary. A range of difficulty levels enables children to play this online game as a simple six-piece classic puzzle or at a more complex level -- for example, as a 22-piece wavy puzzle. When you begin the game, an on-screen timer monitors the time you take to complete the puzzle and stores the information so that you can aim to improve your score with your next play session.
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References
- Photo Credit boy with computer image by Oleg Berlov from Fotolia.com
