Games for Preschoolers: Twelve Minutes, One Skill, No Ads

Preschool is not early school. Almost nothing a three-to-five-year-old needs is academic content — it is the machinery that makes content possible later: holding an instruction in memory, finishing a thing they started, noticing that two objects are the same, and not falling apart when the answer is wrong.

So what should a preschool game train? Four things, in this order.

1. Listening. One spoken instruction, carried across a few seconds and several taps. Every game here speaks its task and will repeat it on request; none of them require a single word of reading.

2. Matching and sorting. Same/different, by colour, by shape, by sound. This is the root of both letter recognition and number sense, and it is the cheapest thing to practise.

3. First symbols. The sound a letter makes — not its name — and the numeral that matches a quantity up to ten. Letter names are actively unhelpful here: "aitch" contains no clue about the sound in hat.

4. Finishing. A maze with an exit, a tower that gets built, a robot that reaches the station. Preschoolers need the end of the task to be visible from the middle of it, otherwise they abandon it.

Screen time, practically. Ten to fifteen minutes, once a day, ideally at the same time. Sit within arm's reach. Say the word or the number out loud with them for the first few rounds, then go quiet. Stop while they still want more — that is what makes tomorrow easy.

When your child is comfortable here, move to games for kindergarteners or pick by age: games for 4 year olds and games for 5 year olds. First numbers live under math games for kindergarten.