Free KiddieGames Online Games For Kids

For a multicultural infant experience, or just to learn how to correctly pronounce the letter “Z” in New Zealand, strap your baby on board and surf on over to KiddiesGames.com.

KiddiesGames has a variety of short, flash-based, mildly interactive games for toddlers and young children.  The games, however, are of poor quality and are scattered along a poorly organized page awash in advertisements.  Each mini-game focuses on a single teaching point such as the alphabet, numbers, fire protection techniques, or dialing the phone for help.  Each game is good for up to a minute of toddler attention, but not much more than that.  The games’ backgrounds are very busy, and the soundtracks are noisy and annoying to adults; some were even annoying to my one year old son.  Most of the games can be operated either with the mouse or keyboard.  If your child is not getting involved, the animated child on screen may prompt your child to “hit a button on the keyboard.”  If your baby hits several keys at once, the game may scold your child with, “Don’t bang on the keyboard!” in a childish New Zealand/Australian accent.  Some parents may find this hysterical, while others may be offended.

What this site does best is offer a truly multicultural experience.  All games feature a variety of multiracial animated kids as the stars.  The alphabet game can be altered based on the country or language of your choice.  The “911″ game can also teach the corresponding emergency number in 8 preselected countries.  If your country is not included, just call them and they’ll add it just for your child!  Several sign language games are available for older children as well.  Even the ads are multicultural and feature interesting global baby and child products not seen on usual parenting sites.

A unique feature of this site is the option to pay to personalize the games with your child’s photo.  Submit a cute kid photo and for $6US your child can play one of several games with their own picture.  Just don’t expect the quality to improve with this option.  Definitely try out the demo games first in order to decide if your child wants to play any of the games more than a few minutes before you purchase.

The “Alphabet Bang Game” was my son’s favorite on this site, but he prefers other alphabet games available elsewhere.  Despite my interest in exposing him to a variety of multicultural games, I just can’t bring myself to be a regular on this site. The games just didn’t interest him enough, and they annoyed me.

Free Fisher-Price Online Games For Kids

According to my one year old son, the nightingale is the best. I’m talking about the free ABC’s Learning Zoo game at Fisher-Price.com, one of several enjoyable free activities on this site.

Fisher-Price Fun and Family Time zone offers a series of free online games and activities for infants and toddlers to preschoolers. Several of the games offer various skill levels for babies to advance in as they grow. The only advertising is in the titles of the games and on the main page itself.

My baby has been playing the peekaboo/surprise and alphabet zoo games since he was about 4 months old. He will tolerate the peekaboo games for quite awhile, but the alphabet game is clearly his favorite. In the surprise games, children hit random keys on a standard keyboard to make cartoon characters jump out of a colored box on the screen and make noises or say peekaboo. He usually figures out pretty quickly each play session that he can mash down a couple of buttons for continuous non-stop action with less effort on his part. The alphabet zoo game shows a letter of the alphabet then an animated animal that starts with the letter pops on-screen and makes its appropriate noise. Any keystroke will then advance to the next letter.

The games seem simple, but they are not foolproof. Playing each game does require almost constant adult participation. Certain keys will lock up the screen, and these keys invariably seem to be my son’s favorites. I have to keep the mouse within my reach so that I can quickly click on the page when he hits a function key in order to keep the play continuing and avoid an infant melt-down.

Most of the toddler games require use of the mouse. Little People and Snap ‘n Style characters star in small stories that require mouse clicks to move through the screens. They each have online coloring games using mouse clicks to shade in areas on a cartoon which can then be printed out. You can also print out a variety of coloring pages for offline crayon use, including Power Wheels pages. The toddler games ramp up in difficulty really quickly. The bubble mower and bubble tractor games are almost impossibly frustrating.

We haven’t tried out the preschool games yet, but I imagine there are some good offerings there as well. For my son’s part, he is content just playing the ABC’s Learning Zoo over and over. I have been very pleased with these free activities, particularly because they are available online and therefore we can access them at any relatives house or at my workplace without having to bring any discs along.