Tips for Teaching Your Child to do Puzzles

September 01,2022

Research by Susan Levine, a child maths development expert at the University of Chicago, found that children who play with puzzles at an early age develop better spatial skills and are better at assessing rotation and contortion. In other words, better mathematical thinking skills. In addition to this, what are the benefits of playing with puzzles?

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Benefits of playing with puzzles for children

✔️Good organizational skills and the ability to break down difficult tasks

The more pieces there are, the more organizational skills are tested; dozens of disordered pieces are put together, requiring the child to take their time and put them together in small pieces, which can take a lot of trial and error to succeed.

Undoubtedly, children who can put together puzzles with 100 or more pieces will be more organized and able to break down difficult tasks.

✔️Promotes mental development of the brain

When many children first start a puzzle, they just grab a piece and start putting it together, rarely thinking about how to put it together the fastest and best.

However, after they have played with the puzzle a few times, children discover the relationship between the 'whole' and the 'parts' and begin to think about how each small piece fits together to make a complete picture. This process is an intense activity within the child's brain, where the 'image' and 'memory' are being made simultaneously in the left and right brain, and where the neurons are rapidly making connections with each other, naturally promoting brain development.

✔️Improves observation skills

Children need to distinguish between very similar pieces of pictures several times during the puzzle process, and also put these similar pictures together to see if they are correct. This requires great care and attention for the child to put the pieces together correctly.

Observation skills play an extremely important role for children. Children begin to understand the world by looking at it and observation is an important way of perceiving the outside world and gaining knowledge.

However, not all children enjoy puzzles, so how can they be guided?

How can I guide my child to enjoy puzzles?

Some children are not born with a love of puzzles, so parents can use their brains to guide them. Here are a few simple ways to do this.

✔️Do up-and-down, left-right and right-right puzzles

For children aged one or two, instead of buying a jigsaw, parents can cut up and down or left and right halves of an interesting old picture book irregularly and let the child play with the pieces. Soon, once the child can put the pieces together, cut them into multiple pieces and let the child put the whole thing together.

✔️Putting together photos

Take photos of familiar objects such as apples, cups, bottles, all kinds of food and toys, develop the photos and then cut them into multiple parts to make a puzzle, allowing the child to restore the photos from memory and imagination.

✔️Guided by inspiration

If we see that your child is having difficulty with the puzzle or has lost patience, we can work with them to induce them to look and think, for example: are the two pieces of the puzzle the same color? Is it possible to find the feet and match them up? What is on this piece of grass? Inspire your child to look closely.

Once the child has enjoyed the puzzle, we can then buy the child a more complex, good quality puzzle straight away. Don't just go for the number of pieces, but the most appropriate for your child's cognitive ability.

Puzzles that are appropriate for the child's cognitive ability and age and that the child is interested in will help the child to enjoy them and get the many benefits of playing with them.