Why mazes help
A maze asks a child to plan ahead, look before they move and keep a pencil inside a path. That is the same eye and hand control they need for writing letters between the lines, which is why mazes sit so well next to tracing practice in preschool and New Entrants.
Four levels
- Easy. Wide paths and few turns, for children just holding a pencil.
- Medium. More choices and a few dead ends.
- Hard. Long paths that wind across the page.
- Expert. Narrow paths and many dead ends, for older children who like a challenge.
Mazes for every season
Pick Halloween, winter, spring or another season and the pictures and page border change to match. Each PDF can hold up to 20 mazes, so one download covers a week of early finishers.
In NZ classrooms
- Te WhārikiThe Mana aotūroa | Exploration strand includes children trying different ways to reason and solve problems.
- First 6 monthsFollowing directions to find a place, with position words such as next to, above and under.
- Year 2Giving and following directions with distances and half or quarter turns.
Mazes aren’t named in either curriculum. They sit closest to the geometry work on position and direction: once a maze is solved, ask a child to describe the route aloud. New entrants can use left, right, up and down, and Year 2 children can add quarter turns and “three squares along”.
For preschoolers, the easy mazes are a quiet way to build the hand control that writing will need, and the thinking ahead that Te Whāriki values in play.
Year placements summarised in our own words from the Ministry of Education’s guide to the New Zealand Curriculum, Years 0–8, and Te Whāriki (2017).
