Paper Fidgets and Games to Make for Kids

June 7, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

These paper fidgets and brain teaser games are great to have on hand for road trips or when kids say they are bored. Older kids can make the projects themselves and then play with them, or you can take care of the setup and just let them play.

The hexaflexagon (instructions from Chaotically Yours) is a fun flippy floppy folding shape that can be used as a fidget. It’s made with a single piece of paper cut into strips, folded, and glued. There are videos as well as text instructions in the post if you need help figuring out how to make it. Using different patterns on the paper makes it extra fun to play with.

This magic paper art cube from Hello Wonderful is kind of like a puzzle in how it fits together. It’s a bunch of little cubes that are joined together and can be folded and stacked in different ways to make different images show on the faces. And while they have provided printables you can color and cut out to attach to the cubes, you can also just follow those size templates and draw anything you like to include on the puzzle.

Here’s another one with cubes but it’s actually more of a puzzle that can be solved. There are different puzzle options available to print and assemble from What Do We Do All Day, but the concept is the same whether you’re using numbers or patterns: try to line up the cubes so that no one number or pattern is visible on more than one face at the same time (so no matter which way you turn them, you’ll see each number or pattern exactly once). It’s a challenging brain teaser, but the solution is also in the blog post should you need it.

Looking for more fun paper crafts? Check out this post full of things to make out of paper (for kids and adults) from The Craft Patch Blog.

Learning Activities with Fidget Spinners

Multiplying and Dividing Decimals Printable Games

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Road Trip Printables

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Sun Activities for Kids

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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