10 Brain Teaser Puzzles for Kids to Use in the Primary Classroom

Are you looking for brain teaser for kids to engage your pupils in the morning or when it’s too wet to go outside for playtime?

Using visual brain teasers in the classroom encourages critical thinking and we know kids love this kind of game-based learning!

With that in mind, our teacher team has put together this list of simple but effective brain games that will encourage logical thinking and help your pupils develop those all-important problem-solving skills.

How to Use Brain Teasers in the Classroom

Before we dive in, let’s talk about some of our teacher team’s favourite uses for visual brain teasers in the primary classroom. This list is not exhaustive, but it may spark inspiration.

1. Project brain teasers onto your whiteboard in the morning to serve as a morning activity as children enter the classroom while you complete registration. (These Google Slides full of brain teasers are perfect for projecting!)
2. Use brain teasers as a warm-up activity to set your pupils in thinking mode.
3. Use them as a community builder activity. Build community in your classroom with low stakes group work! Assign small groups of pupils a brain teaser or brain game that they have to solve together to encourage teamwork.

Our Favourite Brain Teasers for Kids

The answers to these brainteasers can all be found at the end of this post, so we won’t give them away until you’ve had a chance to do a little mental workout and improve your own lateral thinking before you give them a go with your pupils.

1. What Comes Next?

Let’s start with a brainteaser that’s all about pattern recognition. Can your pupils work out which patterned block goes in the fourth spot?

2. How Many Blocks Are in This Tower?

A brainteaser to test pupils’ spatial visualization and their ability to study 3D shapes. Can they determine how many blocks are in this 3D tower?

3. Spatial Visualisation Test

This brainteaser is great for testing spatial visualisation. To correctly guess, pupils have to mentally put together the 3D cube.

Print out 3D nets to turn the brain teaser into a hands-on activity!

4. How Many Triangles?

In this visual brainteaser, pupils need to put their brains to work to figure how many triangles there are in the image.

5. How Many Squares?

This one is similar to the brain game above; however, this time, pupils need to work out how many squares they can see.

6. Move One Glass Only…

In this visual brainteaser, pupils can see three glasses on the left that are full and three on the right that are empty. If they make one small change, they can make a row of alternately full and empty glasses, but they only do one change! What do they have to do?

Once they’ve figured out the answer, how about trying a kid-friendly STEM experiment with water?

7. Make 10

The matchstick test is a great problem-solving brainteaser. Pupils need to remove six matches to make 10. Which ones do they move?

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8. Top View

In this non-verbal brainteaser, children must figure out which is the top view. You may like to time them to see who can work out this one the quickest…

9. Which Parking Spot?

This visual brainteaser was spotted on a Hong Kong first-grade admissions test, and it’s a great puzzle to encourage children to think laterally. Can you work it out? Apparently, children around age 6 are much more likely to solve this problem than older kids and even adults.

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10. What Do We Weigh?

This is a great mathematical problem-solving activity for pupils to figure out the weight of a frog, sheep, and horse. Can they do the calculations to find out how much each individual animal weighs and then determine the total weight of all three?

Finished?

Finished these visual brain teasers with your class? Why not try these 20 brainteaser task cards that get children moving and thinking, using common classroom supplies such as crayons to solve problems?

Explore more games to use in your classroom!

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Brain Teaser Answers

1. Opposite squares are exchanged in this problem, so the answer is A.
2. There are 9 blocks.
3. B and C can be immediately rejected visually. D will create a mirror image of the given cube. So the correct answer is A.
4. There are 44 triangles.
5. There are 40 squares.
6. Pour the second glass from the left into the empty glass second from the right.
7. You can make the word ‘ten’ by removing the bottom matchstick and two side matchsticks from the first letter. The far-right matchstick on the second letter and the top and bottom matchstick on the third letter.
8. The answer is C.
9. Turn the picture upside down. You will then see the following number sequence: 86, ?, 88, 89, 90, 91. So the answer is 87.
10. Calculations will determine the weight of the horse is 17 kg, the frog weighs 3 kg, and the sheep weighs 7 kg. The total weight is 27 kg!