Sudoku puzzles offer an excellent way to help children develop their use of problem solving skills and reasoning.
The puzzles work purely on logic, and although they feature numbers they could equally be made using letters, icons, colours or pictures.
Completing a puzzle gives a real sense of satisfaction, but the amount of challenge has to be right.
If a puzzle is too difficult, children may start to guess – then they will find themselves stuck with errors that are difficult to unravel.
Getting that challenge right is the hard part.
For some children, you might want to start with the pictures or symbols instead of numbers.
These are easy to create yourself, but we have a fun set of (4x4) starter grids on our sister site, Mathsticks.com.
The website 7sudoku have hundreds of puzzles you can access for free. They have a good selection of 6x6 grids. These are ideal for children just starting out.
You can find the puzzles here: 7sudoku.com. The puzzles are easy to download and print, but it is equally easy just to copy out onto paper for your children to work on.
From 7sudoku.com
If your son or daughter enjoys working on these puzzles, you may want an easier format to use.
We highly recommend:
A First Sudoku Book by John Pazzelli
The smaller puzzles at the beginning of this book create a perfect introduction to Sudoku. Most children quickly pick up the logic needed to solve these, and this is a great way to develop more confidence with puzzles and problems.
Mini Sudoku For Kids 6×6 by Nick Snels
A huge collection of easy puzzles make this an ideal book for polishing those reasoning skills and preparing for full 9x9 Sudoku puzzles.
