Streaming movies and television shows don’t have to be the only thing that your children get out of their online screen time. When it comes to having fun online, you are rightfully concerned about your kids becoming screen-addicted zombies to video games that revolve around wild behavior and graphic violence. 

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, kids can be negatively affected by violent videos that they spend excessive time engaging with. These gaming routines can lead to lower grades in school; less time spent reading, less sleep, aggressive actions and ideas, and anti-social habits. 

Monitoring harsh influences is a responsible way to guide your children toward healthier behavior and assist them with their growth. You can find the assistance you need by using educational and fun games to play on Facetime to use with kids or students, such as these five kid-friendly FaceTime games.  

1.) Gratitude 

It is totally understandable that kids will concern themselves primarily with their own needs. When they are hungry, they need you to feed them because they are too young to do the cooking. When children see toys that capture their attention, they want you to buy them because they obviously aren’t earning their own money yet. This makes gratitude important for children to learn to prevent them from becoming spoiled, selfish, and unappreciative.

Children need to witness the adults around them being grateful by saying “thank you,” praying to God at the dinner table for things they are thankful for and even sharing their extra money for the betterment of their community by making local charitable donations. 

When it comes to learning gratitude, it is extremely necessary that kids see their parents remain consistent when showcasing that they are grateful to normalize this positive behavior. Gratitude can be turned into a FaceTime game to make it fun for your children by asking questions and creating Gratitude Cards to get kids focusing on how they feel, think, and recognize things they are grateful for. 

2.) Cookie Maker 

When children learn to read and solve math problems, they may first believe that they have to do it just to get good grades in school and make their parents and teachers happy. But why not teach children why reading and mathematics are needed in the real world? One way to accomplish this is by exposing them to cooking and baking. 

Food recipes require knowing how to read and using the correct numerical amounts of ingredients to create edible foods that also taste appealing. Obviously, you aren’t going to put a step stool in front of your stove and let your young kids risk getting burned. But you can use a safe FaceTime game such as a Cookie Maker activity to use reading and math to create virtual cookies. 

3.) Monster Match 

If you travel a lot for your job and you are looking for ways to play games with your children on FaceTime, you may want to play Monster Match with them to have some fun from a distance. This is a way to get your kids to learn about their emotions by labeling them with the appropriate words. You can help your child match the monsters in the game and determine the emotions associated with facial expressions. 

4.) Categories Game 

Playing the Categories Game on FaceTime is a magnificent way to improve the memory capacity of your children and to magnify the extent of their vocabulary. When interacting on FaceTime with Categories Game, kids pick categories like animals, colors, and food and fill in the words for that particular category as quickly as possible. The words have to start with a letter that is randomly chosen at the beginning of the game.

5.) Sock Match 

Gaining an early understanding of math methods is not something that you have to wait to develop later in grade school. Even toddlers can begin to learn the elements of math before they even are enrolled in elementary school. Some early math skills that can be taught to children through FaceTime games are patterning, arranging items, and matching. 

Help the young children in your life gain a mathematical foundation to prepare them for their early classroom days of addition and subtraction training by using an activity such as Sock Match. This is a FaceTime game that enables kids and the grownups in their lives to be able to practice sorting out socks that match and classifying them properly. 

Sock Match can be played at various levels that are age-appropriate levels in order for kids to not be too overwhelmed by a difficult level and to be challenged enough with a harder level.

With these five games and many more, FaceTime can go from being a video phone call to becoming a learning tool that keeps your kids entertained in an exciting way.