Does your little one love puzzles? Many children go crazy for simple thinking games – it’s a fun challenge and an activity they often enjoy doing again and again. (We think that children who don’t love puzzles simply haven’t tried the right one.)
But puzzles aren’t just for fun – they can really help your child’s development. Plus there are so many different types of them these days, that you can really spend hours playing all sorts of games for some quality time together.
Why puzzles?
To be fair, most games and toys for children are good for development – if only because toddlers learn from every experience and most toy makers put an emphasis on creating innovative, challenging games.
Still, puzzles have their own extra benefits. They can really help the child develop his or her visual abilities as well as taking first steps towards their spatial reasoning abilities – understanding which part goes where is not trivial at all at these ages.
They need to come to conclusions using environmental hints such as the connective part of the puzzle piece, the colors on it corresponding to the colors of another piece and so on. These are all extremely important abilities!
What puzzles?
Well, when we say puzzles we usually mean the classic kind we all had growing up – square pieces with edges that fit together. For younger ages, you have simpler puzzles in which there are only a few parts.
These types of toddler puzzles are also simple in that the shapes of the puzzle pieces are all different. They are easier to tell apart – for instance an animal puzzle that has one piece for the head, one for the body and a couple more for limbs.
And then you also have the kind of 3D puzzles, where you have to fit the right parts in using all kinds of angels in order to create the scene, like this one –
What about online puzzles?
These are great too! If your kid likes playing on the computer or the iPad (and if you’ve learned how to pull them away from it eventually…) they can really benefit from playing online puzzles too.
These types of puzzles have similar advantages in terms of fitting pieces together. Being only 2D they might not be quite as exciting at ones you can wrap your hands around, but they still require an ability to see the bigger picture, so to speak, and understand how to create it from separate pieces.
For starters you can try TuTiTu’s online puzzles. There is both a classic puzzle game with 9 square pieces – you can build various TuTiTu toys from the beloved series of 3D videos for kids, like the airplane and the clock – and there is also a building game, where you create the toy from differently shaped pieces. Check them out right here!
Which puzzle is your kid’s favorite? Tell us in the comments!
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