There’s a moment most parents hit somewhere around week three. You’ve been naming things in Italian. You’ve been patient. And your child looks up at you and says, in perfect English, “I don’t want to do Italian.”
Here’s the thing: they weren’t objecting to Italian. They were objecting to being tested.
That’s the whole reason games work. A game has a goal that isn’t say this word correctly. The goal is to win, to find the hidden thing, to be faster than your sister. The Italian is just how you get there, so your child stops monitoring themselves and starts producing language without noticing they’re doing it.
Below are 15 games we come back to again and again for ages 3–8. Every one includes the actual Italian you’ll need, with pronunciation, so you can play these tonight even if your own Italian stopped at ciao.
Worth setting expectations, because the gap between what parents expect and what’s normal causes a lot of unnecessary worry.
Speaking comes in three stages, and they don’t overlap the way you’d think:
If your child is at stage one after a month of playing, nothing has gone wrong. Stage one is the work. For more on the timeline, see when to start teaching Italian to your child.
Toca il/la
Touch the …
TOK-kah
Dov’è…?
Where is …?
doh-VEH
Guarda!
Look!
GWAR-dah
Quanti sono?
KWAN-tee SOH-noh
How many are there?
Ancora!
Again!
an-KOH-rah
And two for praise, because you’ll want them constantly: Bravo! for a boy, Brava! for a girl.
1. Tocca il… (Touch the…)
You need: nothing. Whatever’s in the room.
Call out tocca il tavolo (touch the table), tocca la porta (touch the door), tocca la sedia (touch the chair). Your child runs and touches it. Start with three objects and add a fourth only when the first three are solid.
Why it works: the response is physical, not verbal. Your child proves they understood without having to say anything — which means they can succeed at Italian before they can speak it.
You need: clean laundry.
Hold up an item and name it: il calzino (sock, kal-ZEE-noh), la maglietta (t-shirt, mal-YET-tah), i pantaloni (trousers, pan-tah-LOH-nee). Your child fetches or folds. Ask dov’è il calzino? and let them hunt.
Why it works: it happens anyway. Games that ride on chores survive busy weeks; games that need setting up don’t.
You need: five toy animals.
Hide them around one room while your child covers their eyes. Then send them hunting one at a time: trova il cane! (find the dog, TROH-vah). When they bring it back, they say the name. If they can’t, you say it and they echo.
Core animals worth knowing: il gatto (cat), il cane (dog), il cavallo (horse, kah-VAL-loh), la mucca (cow, MOOK-kah), il pesce (fish, PEH-sheh).
You need: a hallway.
Every race, every jump, every countdown starts uno, due, tre… via! (VEE-ah — go!). That’s it. That’s the game.
Why it works: you’ll say it forty times a week without trying. Repetition inside genuine excitement beats repetition inside a lesson every single time.
You need: a pillowcase and five familiar objects.
Objects go in the bag. Your child reaches in, feels one without looking, and guesses. You ask che cos’è? (keh koh-ZEH). They pull it out to check.
Why it works: guessing wrong is part of the game, so being wrong stops being embarrassing. That matters enormously for children who’ve gone quiet in Italian.
Simone dice: salta! (jump), corri! (run), fermati! (stop), siediti! (sit down), gira! (turn around).
Introduce two commands per session, maximum. Six commands in one go and nobody remembers any of them.
Call a colour — rosso! — and everyone has to touch something red before you count to five in Italian. Works indoors, outdoors, in a supermarket queue.
Pairs beautifully with our full guide to learning Italian colours through play.
Play Italian children’s music. When it stops: fermati! (FER-mah-tee — freeze). When it starts: balla! (BAL-lah — dance).
Why it works: the music does the vocabulary work in the background while your child concentrates on not moving.
Cushions on the floor. Shout il pavimento è lava! and everyone gets off the ground. Then start giving instructions between islands: vai al cuscino rosso (go to the red cushion).
Why it works: high stakes, silly premise, and your child is following multi-word Italian instructions without registering it as comprehension practice.
Out the window. You spot something and say vedo un albero (I see a tree, VEH-doh oon AL-beh-roh). Your child tries to spot one too. Then they take a turn.
Useful ones: un albero (tree), una macchina (car, MAK-kee-nah), un cane (dog), un uccello (bird, oot-CHEL-loh), una casa (house).
Count things you pass. Red cars, dogs, buses. Just uno, due, tre… out loud, together. Stop at ten for a while before pushing further — the full ladder to twenty is covered in teaching Italian numbers to kids.
You make the sound. They name the animal in Italian. Then swap — and let them catch you out, because being the one who knows more is deeply motivating for a five-year-old.
Italian animal sounds are genuinely different, which children find hilarious: a dog says bau bau, a cat miao, a cow muu, a rooster chicchirichì (kee-kee-ree-KEE).
There’s a specific problem screen games solve, and it isn’t keeping children busy. It’s this: if you don’t speak Italian confidently, you can’t be your child’s only source of it. Your accent becomes their accent, and the gaps in your vocabulary become the ceiling on theirs.
That’s the gap Parlini Land fills. Every prompt and voiceover is recorded by a real human speaker — no AI voices — so your child hears Italian as it’s actually spoken while you play alongside them. The design is deliberately calm and low-stimulation, which means it doesn’t leave a three-year-old wired at 6pm.
Animals fall from the sky and a voice says tocca sul gatto. Your child taps the right one. It’s game 1 on this list, except the Italian is native and you get to be the one cheering rather than the one being tested.
Jungle, ocean and farm scenes your child taps to hear each word in Italian. This is the one to reach for when they’re tired and don’t want to be asked anything — it’s browsing, not answering.
Three coloured boxes, three objects, sort each one where it belongs. The puzzle version brings out a colour monster to match. Both drill colour words in Italian without a single moment that feels like a quiz.
More on how the on-screen games map to spoken Italian: learn Italian through kids’ games.
Two things change at six, and both change what kind of game works.
They can read. Which means spelling, written words and reading along suddenly become available — and those are the tools that lock vocabulary into long-term memory rather than leaving it as sounds they half-recognise.
They’ve become self-conscious. A four-year-old doesn’t mind being wrong. A seven-year-old minds a lot, especially in front of a younger sibling who’s better at Italian than they are. Games with clear rules and a chance to win work beautifully at this age. Games where an adult corrects their pronunciation do not.
The shift, in one line: at 3–6 you’re building single words, at 6–8 you’re building sentences and spelling.
Nomi, cose, città — the Italian classic, and the best of the lot. Pick a letter, then everyone races to fill in a nome (name), cosa (thing), città (city) and animale (animal) starting with it. Points for anything nobody else got. Italian children play this on every long car journey and it works because the competition, not the vocabulary, is what your child is thinking about.
Indovina cosa penso (Guess what I’m thinking) — twenty questions, Italian only. Your child has to form questions rather than answer them, which is the harder and more valuable skill: È un animale? (eh oon ah-nee-MAH-leh), È grande? (GRAN-deh), Si mangia? (see MAN-jah — can you eat it?).
Sono andato al mercato (I went to the market) — the cumulative memory game. Sono andato al mercato e ho comprato il pane… and each player adds an item while repeating the whole list. Sentence-level Italian, endlessly repeated, and the memory challenge is doing all the motivating.
Cartoons with Italian subtitles on — not a game, but the highest-value change you can make at this age. Now they can read, matching the written word to the spoken one happens automatically and costs you nothing.
Past six, a different set of games takes over — ones that treat Italian as something to be taken apart rather than just repeated.
Pick the Noun, Pick the Adjective, Pick the Verb — three separate games, same format: three Italian words appear and your child picks the one that belongs to that word class. This is the jump from knowing words to knowing what kind of word they are, and it’s the groundwork for reading Italian properly. It also front-runs school: these are the categories your child will meet later as il nome, l’aggettivo and il verbo.
Pick the Vowels — a word appears and your child picks out the vowels inside it. This is the quiet win of the four. Italian has the same five vowels as English, but unlike English it pronounces them the same way every single time — so a child who can reliably find a, e, i, o, u can sound out almost any Italian word they’ve never seen before.
Spelling Game — Complete the word, find the missing letter, add the right letter. This is the one that turns Italian your child hears into Italian they can read and write.
Order the Numbers and Can You Count — number work in Italian holds up well at this age, especially if you want your child able to follow numbers in Italian at speed rather than translating each one in their head.
All of it in real recorded Italian, no AI voices — which matters more at six than at three, because this is the age your child starts noticing when something sounds wrong.
They will. Constantly. Here’s what helps:
Don’t correct — recast. They say “cat!” You say sì, il gatto! and carry on. No pause, no “in Italian, please.”
Accept mixed sentences as wins. “Look, un cane!” is not a failed Italian sentence. It’s a child reaching into two languages at once, which is exactly what bilingual children do.
Never make Italian the price of something they want. The moment Italian becomes a toll gate, it becomes a chore. If they’re resisting hard, there’s a gentler route back in.
Stop before they want to. Four good minutes beats fifteen minutes that ended in a negotiation. Ending on ancora? — asked by them, not you — is the goal.
Less than you think, but you do need to be relaxed about being imperfect. Children copy your attitude to the language far more reliably than they copy your grammar. A parent who cheerfully mangles quattordici and laughs about it teaches something more useful than a parent who avoids Italian for fear of getting it wrong.
If you’d rather build from the ground up rather than pick games at random, start with where to begin with your preschooler.
Pick three games from this list. Not fifteen. Run those three for two weeks until they’re automatic, then swap one out. The families who keep this going aren’t the ones who did the most — they’re the ones who did the same small thing often enough that it stopped being a decision.
Parlini Land is available on the App Store and Google Play, with games in Italian and 10 other languages. Monthly, annual and lifetime plans available. Download Parlini Land today.
