Kids learn to love puzzles from an early age. What’s not to love? They are bright & colorful with lots of pieces to play with and fun pictures. Puzzles aid in developing their fine motor skills, hand eye coordination and cognitive thinking. One thing that they taught me was I should not underestimate my child’s ability to learn based on her age.
At only two years of age my daughter knows all of her U.S states. She knows them by shape, location & name. She learned all of this from doing a puzzle. When we received the foam puzzle as a gift, I never imagined that she would actually be able to do it, but I would take it apart and rebuild it with her daily, pointing out and naming the states as I went. So sufficed to say we were shocked the day that she corrected her uncle as he was trying to place Idaho in the wrong spot. “No Uncle Pete, Idaho goes next to Washington.” From that day on she did her puzzle on her own without mommy’s help.
Don’t mind the fact that Massachusetts is missing.
From there we continued with the geography lessons. We introduced a new puzzle with all of the countries. The countries were all represented by animals indigenous to their region. “Look mama, the Panda bear lives in China.” Yes it does, baby. Yes it does. We now try to teach her everything regardless of how advanced it might seem. I will never underestimate my child again.