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Games to Keep Your Kids Busy This Summer

Posted by Brian Semling on Jul 9th 2018

When your kids are home from school for summer break, it can become quite a challenge to keep them occupied. They demand fun and entertainment, but as these long summer months persist, how can you keep your child’s brain busy too? Strictly Briks solves the problem: our toys aren’t just fun, they’re educational, too.  

AlphaBriks makes language learning fun and effective.

Our AlphaBriks letter and punctuation tiles are compatible with traditional interlocking bricks and are versatile enough to be used by children of all ages. Try some of these Alpha Brik games with your kids to get them excited about building their language learning skills and to keep their brains active this summer while they’re off from school.

Summer Games for Grades K-2

Letter Recognition

AlphaBriks provide a fun way for kids to practice their letters. For a simple game, practice letter recognition by calling a letter aloud. Have your child place the correct lettered tile on their baseplate. When they choose the correct letter, challenge them to think of words that begin with that letter. Reward them with something special when they name the letters and words correctly. This activity can be made easier if you arrange just one of each letter tile into an alphabet at the top of the baseplate first, or you can make it more challenging by having your kids hunt for the letters in their storage bags. You can also play the game in reverse for an easy and fun clean up by naming the letter your children should remove from the board.

Build the Alphabet

This is another simple game that’s easy for kids to play and helps them learn the alphabet. Have your children build the alphabet by hunting in their bags for each letter. Challenge them to see who can complete the alphabet the fastest. Or have your kids try working in teams. Team members can take turns drawing letters and putting it where they think it belongs in the alphabet. As more letters fill in, they may have to move existing letters around to make space for new tiles if they misjudged their spacing.

Handwriting with Bricks

Use a pile of traditional building bricks to practice upper and lower case letters. Call out a letter, and have your kids use their bricks to form the letter on their board (for example, making a circle of bricks for the letter "O"). They can then cap it off with the matching AlphaBriks letter tile. This is a great activity for introducing a new letter and for matching upper and lower case letters.

Summer Games for Grades 3-4

Spelling Bees

Create an old fashioned spelling bee using AlphaBriks.  Instead of having children spell a word aloud, have them spell the word with tiles on their boards. You can have them track how many words they spell correctly by using traditional building bricks as counters — just have them add one block to their "success towers" for every word they get right. Challenge them to build their success tower as high as they can.

Rhyme Time

To practice the concept of rhyming, spell a series of words on your children’s board. Then have them use the remaining letters in their bag to replace the beginning of each word to make a rhyme. For example, they could remove the letter "C" from "cat" and replace it with a "B" to spell "bat". If they play with a group of friends have them trade boards to make as many rhymes as possible.

Hangman with Alphabriks

A classic game of hangman is more engaging with Strictly Briks. Use multicolored square bricks to represent the blanks where letters will go — this will help both puzzle makers and solvers keep track of where the letters belong. Use traditional building bricks to build the hangman with a head, body and limbs as they guess incorrect letters.

The Word Dump

How many words can your child make in just two minutes? Find out! Timed challenges can be a free-for-all that allows any word, or you could center this fun spelling game around a vocabulary theme from any subject you're working on together. You can play this game in groups or individually, and there's no limit to the number of topics that this would work for. It's a fun way to reinforce a wide range of learning.

Summer Games for Grades 5-6

Categories

Call out a category and have your kid spell out as many words as they can think of that belong there. Everything from what they learned last year in school to a list of favorite authors can be put in play. You can increase the level of difficulty by adding a time limit or only letting kids take one handful of letters to use. Make the rules even harder and only use words that start with the same letter or have the same number of letters.

Second Language Practice

If your upper elementary students are learning a second language, AlphaBriks makes spelling practice fun. Any one of the activities listed here presents a fresh challenge in a new language, and beginners will be able to revisit activities that are perfect for K-2 with new eyes. Even something as simple as calling out the name of a letter in a new language so your kids can learn to recognize them will be a whole new ballgame in the target language! And with extra question marks and exclamation points, Spanish students will have no trouble punctuating properly with an upside-down mark at the beginning of the sentence.

Whether your children just finished kindergarten or are soon-to-be sixth graders, AlphaBriks are a fun way to keep children’s brains active through their summer vacation. If you’re struggling to keep your kids busy, these AlphaBrik games are a great way for kids to play and learn. Easy set-up, easy clean up, and endless educational fun, AlphaBriks are the ideal summer toy for both parents and children.