Jigsaw Puzzles for Kids - Colours, Shapes and Active Fun

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Jigsaw Puzzles for kids help your child have fun, devbelop, learn and expand how they see the world. Even better, a chance to play with the family!

Clearly your child’s safety comes first so be sure to pick age appropriate puzzles as guided by the manufacturers.

So, how do you make puzzling a fantastic experience for your child?

Jigsaw Puzzles For Kids - Benefits

Your part comes first. You create:

• The setting, with a nice play area
• The enthusiasm, with a real positive, full of energy style. That is even though you have a mountain of other things to do!
• A fantastic experience for the child so they feel close to you

Ellie responds amazingly to a fun environment where she seems to let her imagination run free. She also loves to succeed. So we break the puzzle down into doable chunks sensibly. Taking the edges and obvious colour/picture matches. Each small success seems to spur her on to persevere with jigsaw puzzles for kids.

Jigsaw Puzzles For Kids - Benefits

Your child gets a great deal from this positive experience. Watching my wee girl closely I feel she:

• feels special as I spend time with her
• learns to talk and share her thoughts with me
• improves her hand to eye coordination
• improves the way she logically picks her way around the jigsaw
• recognizes shapes and colours
• enjoys learning
• becomes independent as she knows how to do the puzzle she loves to claim that she can do it “all by herself”
• is increasingly confident
• feels the different textures

If Ellie walks away from the puzzle or is getting a bit frustrated I make sure that is absolutely fine and we do something else. Although if she perseveres then I praise her.

At the end of the puzzle and during completion I make sure I make it fun, and I keep chatting and praising as we go.

(A small point, but I don’t like trial and error as a phrase. I prefer that there is a trial and an event. After the event we can keep the fun level up and try again to put a piece in the right place if we need to. I try to play down things as being a mistake and more a great try.)

Jigsaw Puzzles For Kids - Choosing

Choosing the puzzle is an important task, but it is fun too as you imagine your excited child getting a gift they love.

To get the best benefits from jigsaw puzzles for kids, I have a few loose rules for picking them:

• Non toxic hard wearing materials which rules out cheap cardboard
• Follow the age guide on the box
• I have a good feel for the number of pieces Ellie likes so I stick roughly to it, that is currently 100
• When Ellie was starting on puzzles I picked very simple wooden ones and then progressed to ones where the picture was on the board so she placed the pieces on their image
• I choose pictures she loves which currently is horses, farm animals, princesses and tractors (my in laws have a farm!). She just loves the one made from a family photograph and one of her sister’s horse.
• I like to give her creative side a challenge and order blank ones so she can create her own puzzles.

Jigsaw Puzzles For Kids - More Benefits

I have used jigsaw puzzles for kids to help out in a few circumstances:

• Ellie had a spell refusing to have a bath. Luckily I had a jigsaw that we could build together on the bath tiles
• passing time traveling
• learning PC skills by doing online puzzles

Consider too Educational jigsaw puzzles.

Jigsaw Puzzles For Kids - More Play Ideas

‘Children play longer when a wide variety of toys is available. Playful children are more physically active, creative, humorous, imaginative, emotionally expressive, curious and communicative’. -- Jerome Singer. 1994. Imaginative play and adaptive development.

Some great ideas for play:

• If you have just a short time to play, try telling jokes, washing up and play with the bubbles, do a puzzle, read a book, play a tidying up game, hula hoop or just have a mad 5 minutes!



• If you have an hour to play, try a board game, play cards, eat together, play hide and seek, bake cakes, paint, face painting, dancing, wash the car, make arts and crafts, dress up, act, plant seeds.



• If you have more than an hour, go to the park, go out biking, have a water fight, try gardening, paint, have kids choice, build a den, have a teddy bears picnic.



• Also plan a regular family games night!

The rewards for playing together are enormous!







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