How Puzzles Can Be Effective In Kids Development
PAGE Magazine
By Emma Willson
Kids, adults and seniors, all like to play with puzzles. Puzzles challenge our thinking and exercise our brains. They are a great way to entertain toddlers & young children while serving as a learning tool. Studies suggest that a child’s brain development is significantly affected when they manipulate or act on the things around them.
Puzzles offer that crucial opportunity. Children learn to interact directly with their environment and change its shape & appearance when they play puzzles. Given below is the elaboration that how puzzles can have a profound impact on your kid’s development.
Development of the three primary skills
When your child plays with a puzzle, you can expect three crucial skills to improve:
a) Physical skills: The act of holding puzzle pieces, turning them, and working them to fit in the appropriate place.
b) Cognitive skills: Some puzzles involve a lot of thinking and reasoning to solve them.
c) Emotional skills: To learn patience and get a reward for completing the puzzle.
Those mentioned above three important skills are the building blocks for a versatile person. Each of the three skills breaks down further into specific skills that puzzles can develop for your child. Let’s see all of them in detail:
a) Physical skills:
● Gross motor skills: Stacking blocks and large, easily manipulated puzzles enhance your child’s large movements. This exercise leads to the development of gross motor skills.
● Fine motor skills: When children are engaged with puzzles, firstly, they grasp pieces of various shapes & sizes. Then they analyze them to fit precisely into the correct places. This process comprises sorting & examining different types of forms until they find the correct one. This task develops crucial muscle movements and agility in the fingers & hands of children. In this way, puzzles play a vital role in growing fine motor skills necessary for handwriting, typing, and various other skills.
● Hand-eye coordination: When your child turns, flips, or removes the pieces of a puzzle, they learn the connection between their eyes and hands. Their eyes see the puzzle, and their brain visualizes how it should look or what pieces require to be found & placed. In this way, their hands, brain, and eyes work collectively to identify the part, manipulate it as per the need, and fit it into the puzzle correctly.
b) Cognitive skills
● To understand the surrounding world: Word puzzles allow your child to understand the world around them. Such puzzles improve their vocabulary as well. For example, crossword answers and solutions give them a clue and correct answers when they get stuck somewhere and motivate them to practice.
● Problem-solving: Completing even the easiest of puzzles sets a target to accomplish. The puzzles enable children to think & develop strategies on how to achieve this target. This process involves critical thinking, visual-perceptual skills, memory, and developing solutions that can later be useful in adult life.
● Shape recognition: Puzzles enable children to learn to sort and recognize shapes. Play daily puzzle with your child, identify and sort the pieces first and then assemble them. Hence their aptitude to sort and classify objects improves.
● Memory: To finish a puzzle, kids have to remember which figures work together to form the illustration. If a figure doesn’t fit, the child may hold it for a while, but they still require to retain its color & shape to complete the rest of the puzzle. Besides, children also like to solve the same puzzle repeatedly, which also sharpens their memory.
● Spatial ability: This is the ability to visualize the orientation of objects, their structures, and their relations to each other. Spatial intelligence is very significant and required in many academic and professional fields. Puzzles can improve spatial aptitude among kids.
c) Emotional Skills
● Goal-setting: While working on puzzles, a child often develops a strategy to solve the puzzle faster & more efficiently. For example, he or she may sort the pieces into piles according to shapes or colors. In this way, the child learns to achieve short goals as a means toward a larger goal.
● Task completion & persistence: The process of putting together a puzzle requires strategy and time. Children may encounter confusion and take extra time to solve a puzzle. Working with these emotions helps children develop patience and persistence to keep going in difficult situations.
Final Thoughts
Puzzles offer a fun and educational way to enhance your child’s ability to think while grasping basic life skills. There are many kinds of puzzles which children can play at different ages.
Jigsaw puzzles which require the fitting of cut-out structures into a base are available for all ages. In sliding puzzles, boxes that contain pictures are split into squares with a vacant block. It is quite challenging, but it appeals more to elderly children.
Besides, 3-D puzzles are another kind of puzzle that offers interesting exercises to children. Needless to mention that engaging kids with puzzles can be a beneficial exercise. If your kids are interested in puzzles, encourage them and be a part of their development story.
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