Early childhood education teachers and child development specialists at A Brighter Rainbow Learning Center in Billerica, Massachusetts brighten preschool children’s minds with fun, hands-on activities every day. But what activities can you give your children when they're not at preschool?

When you're home with your child, try these 10 educational games:

1. Connect The Dots: With the letters of the alphabet, make a connect-the-dots outline that creates an image—numbers also work well. Make the outlines more complex as your child’s understanding increases.
2. Spying: In this classic game, someone spots something in the room and describes it, “I spy with my little eye something [insert adjective].” The spy gradually reveals the object’s features to assist the guesser. Activities like this improve spatial awareness and the ability to ascertain different colors, shapes, and other visual details.
3. Shape Up: Get four pieces of paper; keep one whole, cut one in half, cut another in triangular thirds, and cut the last in triangular quarters. The challenge? To recreate the shape formed by whatever combination of shapes you choose. For instance, to create a large triangle (half piece of paper), children would take two of the triangular quarters together.
4. Sky-Gazing: To strengthen your child’s imagination, ask them what shapes they see in the clouds or stars.
5. Memory Cards: Spread a deck of cards out with the numbers facing downward. Children receive a point for each pair of numbers that they match.
6. Letter Shuffle: Choose a word, and then figure out what other words can be spelled with its letters. It's also fun to use the child's first or last name, if lengthy enough to create many words.
7. Word Man: After choosing a word, draw a circle. For each letter guessed wrong, draw a facial feature. The face grows more elaborate with each wrong guess.
8. Captioning: Invite your child to make up captions for people in advertisements. This allows your child to be creative but also make correlations between the pictures and the captions.
9. Cookie Anatomy: Bake cookies in humanoid shapes and have your child identify each body part.
10. Rhyme Game: Take turns saying words or sentences and replying with rhymes.

Playing these games with your children not only encourages learning, but helps develop their cognitive and reasoning abilities, skills they're never too young to learn. To learn more about the advantages of enrolling your child in A Brighter Rainbow Learning Center, visit their website or call (978) 670-9222.