21 Best Educational Games for Kids’ Early Learning

No matter where you look, education has changed dramatically in the past decade.  Gone are the days of strict classrooms and libraries filled with books.  Now, 21st-century technology has digitized everything about our lives, including the way our kids learn from the earliest age.  Knowing where to find the best content and what to look for in educational apps will save you time and keep them challenged and learning on a daily basis.  In a comprehensive platform like Turtle Diary, you will want to see games in every subject, in every category to be sure that your littles are both safe and being challenged by appropriate material.  

List of Best Educational Games for kids

Art

Compose Shapes 

Compose Shapes may seem like a fun art game where you use colored shapes to make pictures, but it is actually an essential building block for spatial awareness foundation.  These imitated pictures teach students to manipulate and rotate figures to fit a certain space and location.  This requires higher order thinking and internal estimations by the student, and often requires practice.  The more they master, the more spatially aware and logically sound they will be, great skills to have in a number of mathematical situations.

Tangrams

Upping the ante from the simple composing of shapes, Tangrams creates actual pictures that students must manipulate their pieces to form.  Varying in size and color, the shapes must be rotated and specifically placed in order to create the exact picture shown.  It’s like a cross between a puzzle and coloring, but more thought-provoking and creative.

Water Sort

Though at first glance it appears incredibly simple, students gain so many skills from this easy-to-play game of test tubes and color.  Full of complex logic and color recognition, students must sleuth out how to get the test tubes completely one color from complicated beginning patterns and rules.  Even fun for adults, it’s a great way to discuss color theory along with logic using scientific tools together.

Geography

Your littles can soon be geographic whizzes with the comprehensive quiz games found in the Geography Games section.  Each is scaffolded so that mastery of one leads to the beginning of the next game.

Continents

Beginning with Continents, students will learn to expand their world view and map skills by learning about each of the seven continents and their location in the world.  Eventually they will be able to locate and place each, meaning they are ready to zoom in to the next level. 

U.S. States & Capitals

Zooming in on North America, students will learn about the location of all 50 states and their capitals.  Not only will they be working with states, learning the names and features of each, but the specific capital location as well.

Capitals Across the World 

With a specific game for each region of the world, this section never gets dull, as students learn specific country names, capitals, and facts about each as they practice map skills in a puzzle-like format.  Watch them wow and amaze their friends at school with this advanced world view.   

Health

Food Pyramid Labeling

This game shows kids a great visual of the Food Pyramid, teaching them the different food groups and the appropriate recommended servings of each per day.  They get to fill in the blanks of the missing labels to practice their knowledge of the different food groups.  It’s a great basic way to get kids started with health, but also with logic and spelling to figure out which words and letters go where.

Human Body Game

Watching animated videos catches students’ attention, so why not incorporate and imaginative and colorful video that teaches the names of human body parts and explains what each part does?  It associates the word read aloud with the word in written form labelling the proper part.  Once they’ve learned the parts, students can move on to the game portion, which involves several different levels of options to guess and label the parts.  It moves section by section through the human body, teaching the lesson first and then checking for comprehension with the game.  An excellent pair!

Language Arts

Hangman

It’s an oldie, but a goodie!  Kids are provided with a category and several blanks that represent letters in a word from the category.  As they guess letters, each more calculated than the last, a monkey will begin to appear with each incorrect answer.  Different than the one we played as kids, this game makes it difficult – it’s a win-win situation either time!  Getting the word correct gives you some graphic monkey action, but getting it incorrect also shows you a monkey piece by piece.  Kids will play against themselves in one version, and against either a classmate or someone online in the second version, giving the game an extra incentive and pressure to guess correctly.  It’s a great way to build vocabulary and work on creating neural pathways that can unscramble words.  

Word Scramble 

Another word game that builds on the skills of Hangman is World Scramble. It is exactly as it sounds – a word’s letters are scrambled up in the wrong order and the student has to unscramble and assemble them in their proper location. Logic and spelling rules will subconsciously play into the success of this game as students increase the power of their lexicon one letter at a time.

Battle of Action Words

Amidst a wide array of action games on the platform, Battle of Action Words brings both adventure and education to the same arena.  Scorpio, both deadly and famished, roams the maze in search of a buggy dinner.  You can help him get the correct meal by guiding Scorpio through the maze to eat the bug with the correct answer – the verbs.  The bugs are a bit unruly though and try to block his path.  This game emphasizes logic, eye-hand coordination, and grammatical aptitude all in one amazing underground maze.

Mathematics

Match the Digital & Analog Clock

Though it might not seem like an essential skill at first, learning to tell time is an important foundational skill for little ones to learn.  It is the basis for many mathematical concepts, including fractions and multiplication.  Even though the concept of time might be hard to grasp, kids can still learn how to read both an analog and a digital clock face.  Games like Match the Digital and Analog Clock can help kids to not only learn how to tell time in both ways, but also connect those pathways in their brains that shows the relationship between the two clock faces.

Hammer Math Games

Who doesn’t love to see something smashed?  Kids get thrilled as they are in the driver’s seat with a huge sledgehammer, smashing the huge granite block to smithereens for each correct answer in the Hammer Math series.  They can start with Hammer Addition, practicing facts and seeing some hammer action with each correct answer.  Hammer Subtraction reinforces those addition skills in the same way, and eventually they will be ready for Hammer Multiplication.  

Number Detective

Place value is a skill that students start building at the end of their kindergarten year.  It is important because it forms the foundation for monetary skills as well as the basics of number formation and eventually will play into decimals as well.  In Number Detective, you not only have to sleuth out the correct place values for the mystery numbers, but use clues to figure out the numbers themselves.  Again, logic comes into play in this fun and challenging way to practice number formation.

Science

Animals of the World

Younger students will love a good puzzle, especially one that involves shadows of world animals.  This game not only reinforces geographical concepts around the world, but it sorts the animals into their respective global locations.  Students will love the colorful graphic animals, which they get to click and pull to the matching location on the continent.  Soon enough, your child will know their continents, how to spell the name of each, the names of many world animals, how to correctly spell and pronounce them, and their location within the planet.  Pretty cool for a game!

What’s the Matter?

Learning the states of matter can sometimes be a complicated concept to grasp, but is an essential skill to master in the early grades. Games that help students not only identify the types of matter, but identify and classify specific options brings science to life.  In this game, a koala bear must make it through the river by jumping from log to log.  It’s fast-paced and students must read the question and jump him to the correct answer before the log floats past.  It does involve some more advanced reading skills, but students will enjoy the little guy bouncing his way through states of matter.

Typing

Typing continues to be an essential skill that easily separates the digitally literate from the illiterate in our 21st-century world.  Thumbs may work great on a phone, but letting your fingers dance across the QWERTY keyboard as you copy, dictate, or think your way through a process shows incredible eye-hand coordination and eventually muscle memory, as your fingers can keep up with the brain way faster than writing longhand can.  

Falling Letter Games

Kids can practice their typing skills in any number of creative and fun ways, but forming those basic muscle memories requires repetition of patterns.  Beginning with just one or two letter, students need to work from the home row keys to establish that feeling in their hands.  Falling letter games help with both location, accuracy, and speed, as the games usually pick up the pace.  From feeding chickens falling letter corns on Farm Typing to shooting falling balloons in Balloon Typing, kids will get those typing skills mastered in no type with fun graphics and timed requirements.

Multiplayer Basketball

Rapid fire typing games require quick typing skills to move things across the screen in a race or a game to score points.  They are extremely popular amongst all students.  In Multiplayer Basketball, students are pitted against each other to help make ballers out of penguins by using their rapid fire typing skills to best their opponents and score buckets.  Who wouldn’t want to see a penguin dunk?

Speed Typing

Once they’ve built up their typing skills by practicing for at least 10 minutes every day for at least two weeks, students will have gained their proper foundation from those home row keys.  Now it’s time to work on fluency – both speed and accuracy.  Enter Speed Typing, the fast-paced game guaranteed to up your word-per-minute prowess.  Try your hand at it too and see who can type the fastest!

Fun & More

Picture Labeling

One of the best series games is Picture Labeling, which allows students to choose pictures from a variety of subjects and fill in the missing letters to correctly identify parts.  This is an essential skill for grade schoolers, and is often used as a graphic organizer in school as well as a quiz or test question.  With everything from Butterfly Life Cycle to Dinosaurs, Human Body Parts to Turkey Body Parts, the labeling section of Turtle Diary has got your student covered!

Snakes & Ladders

Much like the popular board game, students play against a friend to roll the dice and try to make it to the top of the board amidst slithery snakes that threaten their paths and ladders that provide shortcuts up.  Rolling the dice, counting and visualizing the pips, and using the number skills to proceed through the board are all great skills for students to master in an amazingly fun way.

No matter what skill your student is trying to master, Turtle Diary has all angles covered, from a variety of subjects to different variations of games scaffolded to reinforce and grow essential elementary skills.  One thing is for sure – your kids will never get bored learning using educational apps online at Turtle Diary for free.