Winter Riddles

Do your kids like silly riddles? I can remember laughing hysterically over riddles as a young girl. My own children loved to tell jokes and riddles, too, to see if they could trick me. Riddles help stretch a child's thinking just enough to be fun. Having riddles to read can also motivate kids to improve their reading skills.

With these things in mind, I have written this page on fun riddles with a winter theme. I plan to add additional pages on fun riddles with different themes as I go.

I hope you and your kids will enjoy trying to trick each other and make each other laugh, too.

Christmas Riddles
Some riddles and knock knock jokes to help with the countdown to Christmas.

New Year's Riddles
Ten silly January Riddles to share with kids.

You and your children can make up your own fun riddles, as well. It may seem as if you are just playing around, but when children make up riddles, they are stretching their thinking skills.

Riddles use all kinds of skills useful in reading and writing. A riddle can use a metaphor. It can take properties of words, such as whether the word has more than one meaning, or whether it has a homonym ( a word that sounds like the first word but is spelled differently).

A good riddle always surprises. It gives you that "aha!" moment, a moment when you think to yourself, "I should have thought of that!" So the person writing the riddle has to be able to think of something in more than one way.

Because riddles make you laugh, they are a way to share the fun of language. And children who enjoy riddles will be eager to read a book of riddles. A little motivation can show a child that reading can be a fun thing to do.

Riddles are actually a very ancient pastime for people who enjoy words. They also occasionally have had life or death consequences. Remember the Riddles of the Sphinx? Some very sophisticated riddles have been posed over the centuries to test the wits of those who cared to rise to the challenge.

The book above with the cover showing the funny looking brain with glasses is filled with this type of riddle. These riddles require some serious thought. Some of the answers may still strike you as funny, but they are usually a clever sort of funny rather than a funny ha ha.

Riddles of this type are useful for us over the hill types who need to keep our brains limber, but younger people would benefit from the mental gymnastics they pose as well.

So what do you think -- will you try to make up a riddle to share with someone? I know some riddles can be annoying after you've heard them a dozen times, but for the child telling it, that riddle may be brand new. And terribly funny.

Why did the snake lose his skin?

To get to the other hide.