Sudoku for Kids

I love magnetic travel games for kids and was super excited when they came out with a magnetic sudoku for kids.  I love to do sudoku puzzles so I have been trying to teach my daughter how to play by creating simple ones and putting them on her dry erase board.  She is picking up the concepts pretty quickly but the problem is that she has not mastered writing numbers so I have to write the numbers in for her.  Right now that is fine because she still needs some help making sure the puzzle is correct but as she gets better my miss-independent girl is not going to like to only be able to play sudoku with mom.  This magnetic sudoku will allow her to play by herself (after I set up the puzzle for her). 

The red backed numbers represent the numbers that cannot be moved and the yellow backed numbers are the ones the kids use to fill in the puzzle.  Instead of going up to 9 like the adult sudoku, the number stop at six so the board is much smaller and the puzzles are easier.  It comes with a booklet of puzzle set-ups and solutions but for starters I recommend creating your own that are super easy.  In the example above I just left one square in each row/column open.  I started teaching her to make sure every row/column had a 1,2,3,4,5, and 6.  Once she mastered this idea, I started showing her that each rectangle (hard to tell in picture but each rectangle is made up of six squares of the same color) also needs to have one of each number.  We are still working on this so the puzzles I create for her now usually still look like the example above plus one more open square so that she has to look at the rectangle along with the rows to figure out which number she needs.