Homeschooling Resources - Puzzles

Since the early days of planning to homeschool, I've put a lot of effort into collecting resources that will enhance DD's experience and learning. We started with puzzles very early on, somewhere between 6 and 12 months (my memory is a little fuzzy at this point), and DD was soon whizzing around doing the simple wooden peg puzzles with ease. These have now been packed away for my niece who is due to arrive within the next month.

Finding more complex puzzles was a bit of a challenge though. They jumped from simple single piece puzzles to ones that were far too complex for a toddler. But persistence paid off, and here and there we found some real gems. My mum found this bear dressing puzzle, with lots of different costumes for the bear family.

These shape puzzles I found for a couple of dollars each at a bargain store. They are surprisingly complicated, and offer a lot of opportunities for developing an understanding of fractions.

These shaped multi piece puzzles we bought at Judius, an educational store that supplies many schools and educational resources (along with some great musical supplies, which I'll detail in another post when I find the box they're all packed in). She loves these dinosaurs. The bird and dolphin aren't quite as popular, but still get done on occasion.

However, my all time favourite are these ones that I bought at Dragonfly Toys last week. To start with, they are simply beautiful to look at. I could stare at them all day, couldn't you?

But more than that, these puzzles offer real opportunities for developing creativity. Unlike other puzzles, there is no right way to put these together. Yes, they come in an original configuration, but the possibilities of these puzzles are limited only by your imagination. They each come with pictures showing some possible combinations, and DD quickly tried out some of these, following the pictures surprisingly easily.

She then quickly moved on to coming up with her own patterns. There is so much to learn in what appears to be a simple rainbow puzzle. The colours of the spectrum, size differences, visual discrimination, manipulation skills, and probably half a dozen other things that I'm not even aware of.

Even I was inspired to try my hand at some different patterns. I think that's the sign of a really great toy, that it's simple enough to inspire children, and even the adults want to have a turn playing with it. We played with these puzzles for nearly an hour when they arrived in the post. The other two puzzles are a little more complicated, and while DD has enjoyed pulling them apart and putting the pieces back in random colours, she probably still has a little way to go before she's ready to start experimenting with colours and patterns. No doubt we'll have a lot of fun with them over the next year though.

With so many puzzles, it's a challenge to keep them organised. Our order to Judius included this puzzle rack, which works really well for the flat A4 sized puzzles, which we still have plenty of. In this stack are some letter and number puzzles, a map of Australia, and some other multi-piece puzzles.

That still left a lot of puzzles with lots of pieces, but no boards. Originally we stored these in plastic cliplock bags, but aside from my dislike of plastic, these would quickly get crumpled and dirty. I wanted some sort of reusable storage for these puzzles. My first thought was drawstring bags, but the fact that you couldn't see what was inside was a definite drawback to that idea. So I decided to make them out of netting. DD loves these, and loves putting the puzzle pieces into them (very helpful when it comes to the tidying up part of the day), and it's very easy to see what is inside of each one. Unfortunately, the netting doesn't appear to be very strong, and a few of the bags have ripped already. I plan to line them with a second piece of (hopefully) stronger material from our mosquito nets, which should remedy this. I'll probably make a few extra bags too, since I think there are a few more puzzles that could benefit from ending up in bags.