7 Paper And Pencil Games To Make As A Family – Being Parents
It is normal for children to be bored. This boredom leaves room for their creativity and their ideas to get out of this state even if, sometimes, they are bored and do not know what to do.
This is where we parents can help them by finding homemade activities that can be fun for everyone. How about paper and pencil games? We’re sure they’ll love it!
Normally, we play board games, watch movies, spend time on the game console… But paper and pencil games can help the whole family have fun and also stimulate children’s thinking.
Paper and pencil games for young children
Now that we have a lot more time to get bored and may be running out of ideas, these games can definitely get us out of trouble. We must keep in mind that these games should be age appropriate for children in order to adapt the difficulty to their abilities.
Join the points of a drawing
This game is great fun and also helps to improve reasoning. Parents, even if we don’t know how to draw great things, surely we can do simple ones like an orange, a fish, a teddy bear, etc.
We have to draw, by means of numbered points, the design that we want so that, when these points are joined, it appears. Tip: you can draw in pencil very freely, then erase the silhouette and mark the points with the numbers.
The children will have to trace the numbered dots until they get the silhouette of the drawing. They will love this game for the excitement of finding out which design will appear behind those little numbered dots.
The funny monster
This game, besides being easy, puts creativity to the test. What we will do, in turn, will be drawing, so we will need a sheet of paper and a pencil.
The first player will draw the head of the monster. When you are finished, fold the paper so that only the collar is visible. The next player will continue to draw the shoulders, the trunk… then fold it up until there is only a small drawing left for the next player to continue drawing parts of the monster.
This way we will continue until all participants have drawn something. When everyone is done, we’ll open the page and our super monster will appear. Kids will love it and you will have a lot of fun!
Who am I ?
One of the players draws a character or whatever object they can think of and the others have to guess what it is.
Paper and pencil maze
On a sheet of paper, we, the parents, will draw a maze and our children will have to find the way out. On the one hand we will draw, for example, a child, a rabbit or whatever we can think of and, in the end, a ball, some carrots, etc. The mission is to find the exit by joining the two sides, the entrance and exit of the maze with the line.
Paper and pencil games for older children
Alphabet soup
We can buy them ready-made for the kids to make or create ourselves. We will draw a square on the sheet of paper and place the words, vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and once we have them we will fill the other spaces with free letters, well placed in rows and columns.
The hanged man
Who has never played this game? A player must draw as many dashes as there are letters in the word to be guessed. If we want the difficulty to be less, we can put a few letters as a clue right from the start.
The players who have to guess must say the letters. If they are in the word, they appear; if they are not, they will have to draw a person as they go: the head, the body, an arm, another arm, a leg… So on, until they have drawn the whole thing. ; then they will have lost because they took too long to guess the word.
The small bin
It is a very fun game. At the top of the sheet, which we will have placed horizontally, we will put different categories: names, animals, cities, fruits, countries, colors, food, furniture, etc.
At the start of the game, one player comes up with a letter, and all players have to find a word for each category that begins with that letter. When a player has finished filling all of their categories, the game ends, even if they have not all finished, and points are counted.
Each correct answer gives a total of 2 points and, if several players compete on the same word, they each add up to 1 point. Multiple rounds will be played and the player with the most points at the end of each round wins.
As you can see, you can have fun at home with very little equipment. These paper and pencil games, in addition to being entertaining, provide children with many cognitive, reasoning, strategy and logic benefits. They also develop manual dexterity, build vocabulary and encourage creativity. What are you waiting for to put them into practice?
