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 pre-K and Kindergarten.
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.
Provincial curriculum links
- BC KPositional language such as beside, on top of, under and in front of.
- ON Grade 1–2Coding starts with putting steps in order (Grade 1), then moving objects across a grid (Grade 2).
Mazes aren’t in any provincial curriculum. Their value in Kindergarten and Grade 1 is pencil control and planning ahead, both of which support printing. To turn a maze into a math conversation, ask students to describe the path out loud, step by step: go down, turn left, go past the dead end.
That talk uses the positional language in BC’s Kindergarten curriculum, and the step-by-step thinking behind Ontario’s early coding expectations. Older students can write the route as a list of moves and swap with a partner to test it.
Summarized in our own words from the BC Mathematics curriculum (Kindergarten) and Ontario’s overview of The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Mathematics (2020).
