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Are jigsaw puzzles good for children?
Why do jigsaw puzzles in early childhood?
What age can kids do jigsaw puzzles?
Why do jigsaw puzzles work?
- Fine motor development. Jigsaw puzzles help to develop and refine a child’s fine motor skills. In order to play with a jigsaw puzzle, children need to pick up, pinch and hold pieces, move them around and manipulate them into the correct slots.
- Hand and eye coordination. Playing with jigsaws requires trial and error. If a piece doesn’t fit, a child must put it down and try another one. This is all fantastic practice for developing a child’s hand and eye coordination.
- Problem solving and logical reasoning. Completing a jigsaw puzzle successfully can’t be cheated so your child needs to use critical thinking, reasoning skills and problem solving – all skills which are valuable in later life.
- Spatial awareness. Clinical trials* have proved that by working out how smaller pieces fit into the bigger picture children develop their skills of movement, depth and distance perception – known to neurologists as visuospatial functioning!
- Chunky Pet Puzzle. Chunky puzzles with large pieces for little hands are a good first puzzle experience. Choose a puzzle that interests your child, like this pet-themed Melissa & Doug puzzle.
- Two-Piece-Matching Puzzle. Two- and three-piece puzzles help kids learn how to match one part of a picture with another and how to click those pieces into place.
- Individual Puzzles. Puzzle sets that include small puzzles with a few pieces, like this farm animal set from Skillmatics, allow kids to try more difficult puzzles without getting overwhelmed.
- 12-Piece Jigsaw. Your child’s first jigsaw puzzle will probably be 12 pieces, like this Mudpuppy dinosaur puzzle. We love that this one has its own case that makes it easy to keep all the pieces together and store a bunch of 12-piece puzzles in the same bin.
- Fine Motor Skills
- Gross Motor Skills
- Visual Perception
- Eye-Hand Coordination
- Early Maths
- Attention Span
- Problem-Solving
- Independent Play
- Spatial Relations
- Cognitive Development
Puzzles are an excellent tool for developing fine motor skills. As children handle the small pieces, they strengthen their finger muscles. They have to pick them up, turn them and hold them carefully to join them together, which requires good control. As with other fine motor activities, make sure the size of the pieces is appropriate for a child’s...
Certain puzzles, like large floor puzzles, can also develop gross motor skills. As children need to move their bodies around while building them, they strengthen the larger muscles. The motion of stretching across the body to pick up a piece to the left or right of a child, or placing it in position by leaning across the centre of the body, is grea...
When children build puzzles, their eyes are seeing the shapes, images and forms on the pieces and this information gets sent to the brain, to interpret it. This is called visual perception. Without this skill, you would not know or understand why two pieces should connect together, or how they form a part of the bigger picture. Visual perception is...
Also part of developing visual skills, eye-hand coordinationis the ability of the hands and the eyes to work together to function and perform tasks, such as catching a ball or tying a shoelace. Building puzzles from an early age is a simple way to build eye-hand coordination and develop a child’s visual-motor integration, also an important skill fo...
During puzzle play, children learn to see patternsand shapes, in the pieces as well as in the complete picture. Shape recognitionis an important aspect of geometry, and patterns can be found in almost all mathematical concepts.
Have you ever noticed that when a child puts a jigsaw puzzle together they are sitting still for a few minutes longer than usual and they appear to be lost in what they are doing? This activity is an excellent one for getting a child to focus all their attention, without getting distracted, and it’s one that can slowly train a child to concentratef...
Take a closer look at children building puzzles and you will see the smoke coming out of their ears. Puzzles make them think hard. A puzzle is just that – a puzzle. It needs to be figured out – in a logical way, through trial and error, or by matching colour, shape, pattern, etc. Teaching children about problem solvingshould happen during play, by ...
Playing with puzzles is a great way to encourage independent play. It’s an activity that doesn’t need adult intervention, and it can be happily done without peers. This can help children learn to entertain themselves, especially when they are young and constantly seeking adult attention. By playing for pockets of time on their own, they learn to fi...
Developing spatial relations is about learning how objects are positioned in space, relative to each other. This is important for reading and writing and understanding how numbers and letters are positioned, as well as their orientation (e.g. differentiating between letters b and d).
Building jigsaw puzzles in early childhood has all-around cognitive benefits. According to sciencedaily.com, research also shows that the types of puzzles a child can do actually shows their level of cognitive development. While a three-year-old mainly builds a puzzle using trial and error, a four-year-olds matches the pieces based on information i...
Jul 28, 2020 · University of East Anglia. Summary: New research shows that children only learn to do jigsaw puzzles once they have reached a certain stage of development. Three-year-olds use trial and...
Oct 29, 2020 · Studies have shown that doing jigsaw puzzles can improve cognition and visual-spatial reasoning. The act of putting the pieces of a puzzle together requires concentration and improves short-term memory and problem solving. Using the puzzle as an exercise of the mind can spark imagination and increase both your creativity and productivity.
Oct 18, 2021 · Jigsaw puzzles are some of the best activities for children. They’re fun, engaging, challenging, and you can also use them as learning tools to enhance your child’s development. Even simple puzzles require a level of skill and determination to put together. Once completed the results are gratifying for any age, but particularly for children.
Jan 22, 2019 · Jigsaw puzzles are a common sight in PreK and early elementary classrooms. Little ones learn spatial reasoning, hand-eye coordination, and basic concepts like shapes and letters using these puzzles. By late elementary, puzzles are usually relegated to a game shelf to be brought out during indoor recess, if at all.
