Free printable mazes for preschoolers
Four pages of the book, easiest first. Activity 3 is a single wide channel a three-year-old can finish. Activity 16 is a 4×4 with a second dead end. Activity 32 is a 5×5 entered from the top. Activity 80 is a 9×9 whose dead ends run longer than the true path. Each page carries our mark and this address where the book prints its page number, and is otherwise the page as printed.
US Letter · 4 pages · black and white · no signup
What is on the sheets
Print at actual size (100%), not "fit to page". The target sizes on these pages are chosen for a particular age of hand, and scaling shrinks them.
Using them well
Start easier than you think
If the child traces the first maze without hesitating, the level is right for practice but too easy to be interesting. Move up one.
Do not correct the wrong turn
Watch them hit a dead end and say nothing. Noticing you are stuck and going back is the skill the maze teaches.
A crayon beats a pencil at three
A fat crayon suits the whole-arm grasp a three-year-old draws with. Pencils come later.
Questions
What ages are these mazes for?
Three to five. The first sheet is a Level 1 maze, a single channel 0.55 inches wide with no wrong turns, which a three-year-old can finish. The last is Level 5, a 9×9 grid with real dead ends, which suits a five-year-old who has done mazes before.
Is there a catch? Do I need to sign up?
No. One PDF, four pages, no email address and no watermark. They are activities 3, 16, 32 and 80 of the book, pages 11, 26, 44 and 96, made by the same build that makes the book.
How should I print them?
Letter paper, black and white, at 100 percent rather than fit to page, because the corridor widths are sized for the hand: 0.55 inches on the first sheet down to 0.28 on the last. They are line art, so a photocopier is fine, and a fat crayon is the right tool for the first sheet.
Why only four?
Four is enough to see how the book climbs, and the other 96 are the book. For more free mazes there are two bonus sets on this site, six mazes each, drawn with the same generator and printed in no book.
Guides that go with these
Mazes by age: what a 3, 4, 5 and 6-year-old can do
A maze is three separate skills stacked on top of each other, and children pick them up years apart. Here is which maze belongs to which age.
Fine motorPencil grasp by age, and what helps
Grasp develops on its own schedule. What you can change is what the hand gets to practice, and the size of what you ask it to do.
Choosing a bookWhich activity book for which age: 3, 4, 5 and 6
The maze book lists from three. The others list from four. Here is what sits inside those ranges: the book for each age, the page to open it at, and the sign that says move up.
For grown-upsHow to sit beside a child doing a worksheet
The most challenging part of an activity book is not on the page. It is sitting there while a four-year-old gets it wrong.
How we make themWhy our activity books are printed in black and white
The research behind it, the one finding that argues against it, and what the child gets in return.
Where these came from
These are 4 pages out of 100.
One maze per page, from a single wide channel a three-year-old can finish to an 11×11 grid with real dead ends. The difficulty climbs across this book. Maze 1 is a wide corridor with no branches. Maze 100 is an 11×11 grid, 121 cells, with no help in any of them. Every step in between is a page.
