Kids and Adults Will Love this Paper Version of Tetris

I’ve been doing a lot of posts about games lately (see also my post about printable board game templates) because I think games are a great activity when it’s hot outside. Or cold outside, depending on where you live. Or it’s raining. Or really any time you just need something to do.

I never really got into video games as a kid (or as an adult, other than a couple I play on my phone to pass the time) but I did always like Tetris. Did you know you can play a Tetris-like game without a screen?

One Mama’s Daily Drama designed a printable Tetris board, complete with brightly colored shapes like the classic game.

You can play it a couple of different ways. Start with a stack of shapes and try to put them together like you would in classic Tetris. Then you can either move the pieces down as you fill rows, or just play until the board is full and you can’t make any more moves.

This is fun as a solo game (and would be great for a road trip if you laminate the pieces for durability) but you can also print out multiple sets and have people challenge each other to see how many pieces they can use before they run out of space or how long they can play moving the full lines.

It might also be a fun challenge, instead of drawing shapes to place in order, if you worked with the shapes like a puzzle and tried to fill in as much area in your board as possible using whatever shapes you want.

I think this would be a great one to add to your printable games arsenal, and kids and adults will both want to get in on the fun.

You can grab the printable Tetris game pieces from One Mama’s Daily Drama.

[Photo: One Mama’s Daily Drama]

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Board Game Templates You Can Print [Lesson Plans]

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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