Mazes for preschoolers
For a three-to-five-year-old a maze is a pencil-control exercise with a story on top. These print on a 7 by 7 grid with the dead ends opened up, the walls at their thickest and a faint guide grid behind them, so the job is following a corridor rather than solving a puzzle.
A coding path turns the maze into a write-the-arrows worksheet.
Ages 3–5
Almost every dead end opened. Gentle for small children.
The route has to pass through every one.
How the passages wind. Each one has its own texture to solve.
Customise colours
Bold and chunky are the large-print settings.
A faint grid behind the walls, for the youngest solvers.
Clean drops the title band and footer, leaving the maze.
Two pages: the maze and its answer. The answer is worked out from the maze itself rather than drawn alongside it, so it can never be wrong. Same engine as our KDP studio.
Want the whole book?
This makes one maze. Sign up to turn these settings into a full maze book for Amazon KDP: hundreds of graded mazes at any trim, as print-ready PDFs. We carry your shape, size and every other setting into the studio.
Build the full bookFree to build · pay once to export
Preview
The maze and its answer, as they print.
What a preschooler is practising
Not route-finding. At three or four the work is holding a crayon, keeping a line inside a boundary, and finishing something. A maze is good at all three because it has a start, an end and an obvious moment of success, which a colouring page does not.
That is why the settings here are what they are. Wide corridors forgive a wobbly line. No dead ends means no moment where the right answer is "go back". The guide grid gives a child something to aim between when the corridor is still wider than their control.
Printing a pack for a nursery
Generate, print, change nothing and press generate again: each press carves a different maze at the same settings, so a stack of twenty takes a couple of minutes and no two children get the same page. Printing one-sided keeps the answer off the back where a child will find it.
four ways out of every junction
Rectangular
A grid of squares with walls between them, an arrow going in at one corner and an arrow coming out at another.
- How it solves
- Each junction offers at most three ways on from the one you arrived by, so the choices stay countable and a wrong turn is quick to spot. It is the shape everyone pictures, and the one to start a child on.
- Good for
- Everyone. The default, and the easiest to read at any size.
The other shapes
- six ways out of every cellHexagonalA honeycomb of six-sided cells. The corridors run in six directions rather than four, so the paths slant as well as turn.
- three ways out of every cellTriangularTriangles pointing up and down in alternating rows, so the corridors run diagonally across the page.
- four ways out, but two of them curveCircularConcentric rings cut into wedges, with a gap in the outer rim to enter by and a small circle at the middle to reach.
- four ways out, inside an outlinePicture shapeA square-grid maze carved to fill a silhouette: a heart, a star, a crescent moon, a cat, a tree.
Making a whole maze book?
This page makes one maze. To publish a book on Amazon KDP, the KDP maze maker generates hundreds of graded mazes in one shape, at any trim, as a print-ready 300 DPI interior and a matching solutions PDF. Generate once, export unlimited sizes.
More printable mazes
Questions
- Are these mazes for preschoolers free to print?
- Yes. Generate the maze above and print it with its answer, at no cost and with no sign-up. It is free for classroom, home and personal use.
- Is there exactly one way through?
- Not quite, and that is deliberate here. This page opens with the dead ends mostly opened into loops, so a wrong turn rejoins the path instead of stopping. The maze then has one shortest route, which is what the answer page draws. Set Passages to "dead ends" for a maze with exactly one way through.
- Can I make a maze book to sell on KDP?
- Yes. The free tool makes one maze. Publisher Studio generates hundreds of graded mazes in one shape, with an optional how-to-solve page, at any KDP trim, as a print-ready 300 DPI interior and a matching solutions PDF.