Puzzles are a great way to create a fun learning opportunity for kids.
Simple puzzles help children develop finger strength, perseverance and problem-solving skills.
Ask your child to turn, flip, slide and wriggle pieces into position. Picking up, moving and twisting the pieces of a puzzle helps children to develop finger strength and hand-eye coordination. As your child picks up and positions pieces, they also develop small-muscle control in their fingers.
Playing with these puzzles encourages children to look at pictures more carefully, going over them from top to bottom and from left to right. Through doing this, children may begin to notice visual similarities and differences.
Visual perception is important for learning to read and write, which makes building puzzles a great early literacy and pre-writing activity.
Puzzles build several aspects of visual perception such as:
- Visual memory – the ability to remember what is seen
- Visual discrimination – seeing similarities and differences in things
- Visual comprehension – making sense of what you see
- Perception of shapes
- Visual analysis and synthesis – seeing patterns and putting them together
- Visual closure – the ability to identify what an object is by seeing part of it (e.g. a piece of an eye on a puzzle piece)
Puzzles develop memory skills, as well as an ability to plan, test ideas and solve problems. While completing a puzzle, children need to remember shapes, colours, positions and strategies to complete them.
The experience of completing a puzzle can also help your child to learn to accept challenges, overcome problems and deal with frustrations.
