Free Fun Games for Four-Year-Olds

Online Games

• Although letting your child look at a computer screen can seem self-defeating when it comes to constructive play, online games can teach your child spatial skills and how to use a computer. Classic educational games that require the child to count, arrange blocks and recognize patterns can sometimes be found for free on gaming websites. The downside to online games is that you need to exert control over the amount of time your child spends on them.

Vocabulary Games

• A 4-year old child is at a point in her life when she can put sentences together, start learning to write and even grasp basic math, according to the Public Broadcasting Service Parents website. A child of this age also collects new words and phrases to use in conversation, so a parent can encourage this process by playing vocabulary games with him.

  For example, you can pit two or more 4 year olds against each other in a competitive scavenger hunt or set a stopwatch to time one child. If you know the competitive instinct might get the better of a group, tell them to act as a team in finding an object. Call out items that you know are around the house or in the garden and the children have to run and find them. For example, you could ask for a "green towel", "three eggcups" or "a multicolored flower."

Adventure Course

• Four-year-old children are energetic characters, and if you don't mind messing up your house, you can channel their short-legged, hyper energy into a mini-assault course. Take the cushions off the sofa to use as climbing walls, lay down blue towels to act as a sea for the children to jump over and put a potato on a spoon and set up obstacles to run around. Set up bowls of multicolored candy at the end of the course and the first child to reach the candy and return to the start line with three green, three brown and three yellow candies wins. This game is best played outside on soft grass.

Make Mud Cakes

• There is a fine art to making mud cakes, and your child can have endless hours of fun trying to get a rock-hard consistency to her mud cake. Send the child out into the garden with a small spade so she can find out what lies under the surface of the soil, see what kinds of bugs live there, and use her hands to shape a mud cake. She can experiment with adding water and sand to the mud to get the consistency she wants.