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Fun Riddles

One of the most educational activities for families is enjoying fun riddles for kids. Kids absolutely love riddles. The best riddles to share with your children include cool kid's riddles, riddles about kids themselves, or just riddles about fun things that kids are interested in.

How to Develop Fun Riddles for Kids

There are a lot of potential riddles for children that are very cool. Kids love riddles, especially those that are about fun things that kids are interested in like animals, toys and games, or even about kids themselves.

Creating A Fun Riddle

Using the following steps, you can create a riddle that kids will consider cool, fun, and thought provoking. You can either create these yourself and let your kids try to figure them out, or you can create them along with your kids for an evening of imaginative fun.

1. The first step is to start at the end of the riddle and then work backwards. So, you'll need to start with the answer. For this example, the subject is bicycle.

2. Next, brainstorm as many characteristics of the subject as you can. For example, for bicycle, the characteristics would be:

  • It has wheels
  • It rolls
  • It has pedals
  • It's made of metal
  • It has a seat
  • A human powers it
  • It has handlebars
  • It has brakes

3. Finally, you take two or three of the most generic characteristics and use them to describe the subject in a very vague and creative way. For kids, the easiest way to do this is to come up with a second set of words that rhyme with a characteristic, and use that in the riddle. This is where most of the creativity and ingenuity of riddle writing comes into play. For example, a good riddle for bicycle would be, "Why did the bicycle get fired from the job? Because it took too many brakes!" Or another might be, "Why did the bicycle try out for the play? It wanted the lead roll!"

4. The more advanced kind of riddle is less of a joke and more of a puzzle. To create the puzzle, you describe the object in obscure terms, using the characteristics that you brainstormed. For example, "What can travel faster than a human, but can't travel without a human's help? Answer: A Bicycle!"

Some Examples of Cool, Fun Riddles

Finding educational kid's riddles is not difficult at all. There are volumes of great riddles that will entertain and tease your child's mind for hours. Some of these riddles are even about kids themselves, and others are just about fun things that kids love. Explore the resources below to print out lots of fun riddles for kids.

Riddles about Fun Things Kids Like

The following are a few examples of websites that list some great riddles about fun subjects that kids love. See if you can recognize the word play using certain characteristics of the subject.

  • Best Family Advice has a long list of great riddles. A few examples of objects used in these riddles include a pillow, a chair, or a window.
  • Just Riddles has an entire section that lists riddles that are very creative and written specifically for children.
  • DLTK lists riddles about things like elves, flamingos and the North Pole!
  • Yahoo Kids always delivers with a great updated list of fun riddles that kids will love, covering subjects like dinosaurs, a trampoline, and even a burp.
  • Kieto, a fun family website, lists fifty interactive riddles for kids where you can click on the drop down box to get the answers.

Whether you want to come up with riddles on your own, or collect riddles from around the Internet, they always serve to tantalize the imagination of children. When you prompt children to come up with their own riddles, you'll be very surprised what they come up with!

Final Words

Riddles are very unique tools that you can use, not only to spark the imagination of your child's mind, but also to teach them how to think both concretely and abstractly in order to solve difficult problems. Puzzles help children realize that sometimes the simplest answer isn't always the right answer, and in order to solve a seemingly complicated problem, it's always best to step back and reconsider your assumptions before offering up an answer.

By Ryan Dube