To choose puzzles that you assume children will be able to tackle is an impossible task. You’d be surprised just how many children we’ve seen complete a puzzle that has had a fair few adults foxed!
So this selection is more the type of puzzle that adults would buy for children. By this we mean those puzzles that can be given out in party bags or to keep the younger ones busy at a wedding or when mum and dad are having a dinner party.
Puzzles are wonderful things to introduce to children at a young age. They help with hand/eye co-ordination, make them use their minds without even realising it and gives them a wonderful sense of achievement on completion. The skills they use are often carried on into later life to give a good foundation for many types of problem solving.
All the puzzles have been chosen so as to include as many of the following characteristics as possible:
--- Good quality construction
--- Colourful
--- Low price point
--- Where possible, more than one solution
Please be aware that by their nature, puzzles contain small pieces so they are not suitable for children under the age of 3 years.
This is what we wrote, thinking it would be relatively easy to create a section of children’s puzzles - a few months on, we admit defeat!
When we first put the above text on the page we thought that the real problem would be choosing which puzzles to stock. As it turned out, the problem was to find any puzzles at all!
Our aim was to find a good selection for roughly 5 to 10 year old. There’s plenty about in the form of wooden jigsaw and shape type for up to 4 year olds but once we started looking for the older age group they were either tacky and would never keep their attention for more than 2 minutes or they were in fact adult puzzles.
So we decided to look over our past orders that we had received to see what you were actually buying from our current stock.
The sliding block puzzle shown above has always been a favourite closely followed by the pattern puzzles. The most popular for children are definitely the Nature puzzles because they only have nine pieces. The others do have a lot more pieces so they need plenty of room. Another favourite in this section is the Spider tile puzzle as the same puzzle provides two difficulty levels.
The Transposer puzzles are another popular selection. They are nice and colourful and can be done in the hand and there are lots of solutions - it’s just fun to make patterns with them but there are actual “answers” if the children want to look for them.
