I’m always on the lookout for great new preschool games that teach while little ones are having loads of fun. A good preschool game has an element of pretend play to engage the children such as playing in a vegetable garden, literally showering a puppy dog, or pretending to be a super hero, collecting clues.

Alex Brands Janod preschool games combine a familiar kids’ theme with activities related to the story of a circus, a pesty mole loose in the vegetable garden, making a pizza or walking trough a forest of trees and animals. So many times during speech therapy sessions with kids, I’d be playing a fun game with cute, inviting props and suddenly the child would have left the game play and was spinning a little creative story with the game pieces. I call that a successful play time as kids learned some game play as well as exercised their imaginations and language story telling.

Here are some of my favorites for 2017 that caught my eye with the skills that they can promote:

  • Acrobat: Come watch the balancing act of the acrobats as you roll the die to get a color, and place an acrobat on the matching dot on the circular level. Place three acrobats on a level and then balance the next floor on top and keep building up! Kids learn colors, matching, counting and fine motor skills.
  • Beware of the Mole: Roll the die to get a color and choose the corresponding colored vegetable to slide into your garden. If you roll the mole, you are stuck until you roll him again to put him back in the garden. Kids learn beginning game play and consequences for negative circumstances like rolling the mole. Patience, attention span and vocabulary are all tapped during this fun family game.
  • Speed Pizza: Build your own pizza quickly as kids learn matching and  food vocabulary.
  • Happy Tree: As they play this fun new take on a memory game, kids have to remember the vertical sequence of the 3-part trees with animals on the branches. Memory, pre-literacy skills and sequencing are all tapped as kids giggle their way through constructing the trees correctly.