We’ve Got Some Fun Online Games For You To Play With Your Kids

I recently spent a week with my 5-year-old niece, and sadly she spent most of her time on her tablet, watching Disney shows, playing video games, etc. It was a big shift from when I was a kid, where most of my free time was spent reading books, watching educational shows (Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, The Electric Company), or practicing my spelling on my Speak & Spell.

While my sister welcomed the distraction from the constant “Mom! Mom!”, I decided to look for some fun games that the two of us could play together, and I stumbled across the Culinary School website, which offers a collection of hundreds of different online games for kids. Some of the games are rather basic and geared specifically for kids, while other games are a bit more challenging and are fun for adults too.

She really had fun playing some these games, and I did as well. Here are three of our favorites:

The first game we played was Burger Shop, and this one reminded me of BurgerTime, a game I played growing up, but with better graphics and such. Burger Shop is a restaurant simulation game where you serve customers hamburgers or cheeseburgers which precisely match their orders. A customer comes up and places their order, and then you have to build the burger with the right ingredients in the right order, starting from the bottom up.

Sounds easy, right? Maybe so, but it requires a keen attention to detail (eg. you’ve got to place the cheese before the lettuce), along with a speed component, as the restaurant can get busy, and if you make a customer wait too long, they’ll leave in frustration. As you advance through the 10 stages of the game you unlock additional ingredients and menu items including condiments, hot dogs, french fries, and donuts. It’s a whole lot of fun!

Up next was Penguin Cafe, a cute little game where you play as a penguin on skates working at the aforementioned Penguin Cafe, rushing around waiting on customers as they walk in, and the faster service you provide to them, the better the tips you receive – just like in real life. Once you meet the daily goal, you move on to the next level.

This is a cute little game (she loves penguins, so this caught her attention instantly), but at the same time, it teaches kids about the concept of tipping and how that makes up an important portion of a waiter’s livelihood. While the game starts out pretty easy, the difficulty increases as you advance to subsequent levels.

Last up was Candy House, a match-3 game similar in game play to Candy Crush (which is one of my guilty pleasures). Simply match sets of 3 or more identical candies in a row or column to remove them from the playing field and break any bricks behind them. If you match a set of 4, it creates high-powered candies that can clear out entire rows or columns. And sets of 5 create a wildcard candy which can be used to remove any candy color.

There are 50 levels in total, and you need to clear all the bricks before the timer runs out to advance to the next level, so it definitely adds another layer of challenge to the game. Also, some levels have gaps in the puzzle, requiring you to be strategic in order to match 3 or more candies. It’s a fun game, and my niece picked it up almost instantly.

As I said, they’ve got hundreds of games to choose from, covering a wide variety of genres, so you’re bound to find something that catches your interest. So go check it out, and get ready to have some fun!