In the toy market, puzzles have been always popular with parents. They are a classic toy for generations of children. It seems that most parents believe that playing puzzles could do good to children. In recent years, Kibtoy found that puzzles have always been the best sellers in its online store www.kibtoy.com during the whole year. However, some customers complain that they don’t know how to play puzzles with their children when they decide to spend some quality time accompanying them. In this blog article, I want to discuss what parents should do when play puzzles with children. I hope I could give some practical suggestions to parents on how parents could take advantages of puzzles to develop children’s abilities and skills through playing puzzles with them.
First of all, parents should know the main difference between puzzles and other types of toys. Puzzles are supposed to require children observe the play rules before following them to solve questions. Puzzles come in many types, materials and difficulty levels. Even young babies could explore some simple puzzles which only require them to fit two or three pieces together. Different shapes and colors are used to distinguish these pieces so that children might notice their differences. Then, they will try to fit these pieces according to their judgement on these shapes or colors. As children grow up, they should be given puzzles with high levels of complexity and difficulty to change their increasing judgemental abilities. Actually, children could increase these abilities do solve puzzles with higher complexity through their increasing life experience. For instance, they could learn to sort up things according to their sizes when they see their parents are running some errands. Then they could sort up puzzles pieces like this way when doing puzzles.
Wooden Rainbow Stacking Toyset : children have to follow rules to solve this puzzle.
Then, parents should understand that doing puzzles could not only be entertaining but also educational and constructional to their children. Therefore, parents should know what skills or abilities they should develop on their children before choosing appropriate puzzles. For instance, young infants should learn to grab in order to develop their fine motor skills. So those puzzles with knobs are good for them. When they grow old enough to go to the kindergarten, they should learn to socialize with other children. Therefore, parents should give them some puzzles to teach them how to get along with others. For example, they should learn to take turns, and wait for others. The older children grow, the more abilities and skills they should have and the more complicated puzzles they should be given.
Wooden Chess Memory Match Game: This Kibtoy game could help children develop some soical skills.
During the process of growing up, children could learn many things and skills, such as some cognitive and fine motor skills, and social, emotional and lingual abilities. Parents could use puzzles to explain some rules and remind children to comply with them so that they could develop them as their skills and abilities. In following section, I will articulate five of these abilities and abilities and explain how parents could do to help their children improve them through doing puzzles.
First, parents could teach children to understand the rule of sequencing and how to organize different things in order. In reality, ordinal numbers or words are used to indicate the sequence of a thing. In some puzzles, children are supposed to organize some puzzle pieces together in a sequence. Parents could use words such as first, second, third and last to indicate how to organize these pieces. Following these rules could help children improve their langue impression, logical thinking and so on. For instance, children will know how to explain something in a logical way by using words to indicate the sequence.
Second, parents could develop spatial concepts by using spatial vocabulary. When doing some puzzles, children are required to observe the shapes of puzzle pieces and then rotate, flip and turn them around to fit them in the right places. At the same time, children will have to find the right locations for these pieces. Parents could use words to tell them, such as beside, below and above. All these could facilitate children’s imagination, creativity and perseverance.
Third, parents should encourage children to find their own ways to solve a puzzle. Usually, children could learn the rule of a puzzle in a very short time. Besides, they could have fun to find the solution to this puzzle. However, parents should not stop the puzzle game here but prolong it to extend its benefits to children. To be specific, parents should encourage children to explore more solutions to the puzzle. They could ask children to explain how they find the solution in such as short time and then praise them for more solutions. Children might find they could find multiple paths to the same puzzle when they try to think in different ways. This experience could help them think strategically.
Fourth, parents should use puzzles to challenge their children. In other words, parents should always choose the puzzles that are a little challenging for their children. When children are doing those puzzles which are too easy for them, they will be happy with their easy solutions at first and get bored soon. It could be very hard to get them engaged in the puzzle game. At the same time, when children are doing those puzzles which are too difficult for them, they will be frustrated and become upset. They could be discouraged to do puzzles. Both things above are not the right experience that parents should give to their children. The latter could be destructive to children’s self-confidence. Parents should choose those puzzles which are just a little difficult for children so that they could find the solutions with their own efforts or their parents’ assistance. An appropriate puzzle should be both a fun game and a challenge which could could have fun of and be simulate to think and keep trying.
Last, parents should not only focus on how soon children could find solutions to a puzzle but the process of thinking and trying. Since a puzzle is usually challenging, children might encounter frustration when they fail to find the solution immediately after some attempts. Frustration could lead to some negative emotions. At this time, parents should not tell the solution directly to children but give them some hints to get them back to the puzzle. Children could enjoy the puzzle very much after they overcome the difficulty. They could learn how to deal with frustration and develop more persistence or the courage of confronting difficulty.
