A great activity that is sure to keep kids mentally engaged for hours is a kids rebus puzzle. These types of puzzles are very thought provoking and require that kids really use their reasoning skills to obtain the answer. A rebus puzzle uses a combination of words and pictures in order to create a unique puzzle. The word and picture combination has to be solved. Sometimes the rebuses can simply words that are placed in a certain way to elicit the meaning of a word or phrase. Children can spend hours trying to figure out these puzzles. Rebus puzzles for children are a great activity to keep children quietly occupied.
Rebus puzzles are not new in any way. However, they were not known as puzzles but rather as pictograms. It is believed that the use of pictures or images to relay messages goes back to the Ancient Egyptian era. This method of using pictures to relay messages is believed to be the way people communicated prior to forming an official alphabet.
The use of rebus would become more popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rebus was often used for everything from entertainment to sending secret codes. A rebus was used to identify the coat of arms for a particular person during the knight era. Also, during the 1860's escort cards were made using rebus. These cards provided a very subtle way for a man to ask a woman if he could escort her home by asking May I. C. U. Home. These are just a few examples of how rebus has been used throughout history in order to relay messages.
A kids rebus puzzle is a great way for children to learn the association between words and images. There are a number of different puzzles that children can play. You can use these puzzles to teach children about the importance of word picture association.
Many of the rebus puzzles use a picture and a word in order to relay a message such as
FAST FAST FURIOUS FURIOUS
which is interpreted as 2Fast 2Furious which is a very popular action movie. There are literally 2 fasts and 2 furious words.
There are rebus puzzles that are spelling based. These types of puzzles may use and images and letters similar to a math problem to reveal a word. For example, a picture of a tire minus the letter t plus the letter f equals fire. These are just a few ways that a rebus puzzle can be used to help children identify words and learn to spell as well.
One very popular site that contain a number of fun rebus puzzles for children is the site ran by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. These rebus puzzles are sure to keep your kids mentally stimulated and are a great addition to a lesson plan on environmental issues.