It’s Time for Play: Puzzles
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Children: It's time for play!
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Dawson Nichols: Hi, my name is Dawson, and I wanted to share some puzzles with you today. Puzzles are one of my favorite activities, and I love sharing them with young children because as an activity, it is so rich in learning opportunities. When children are playing with puzzles, they are practicing motor skills, memory, focus, they're learning about shapes. As they get older, they're learning about patterns and sequences and geometry. Research has shown that one of the best ways to help children learn STEAM skills is to give them objects to manipulate in space and to give them opportunity and time so that they can develop strategies for how to put things together, how to understand them, and to practice those strategies over and over again. That's puzzling. That's what we're doing when we're doing puzzles, which is why it is such a wonderfully rich, creative activity, and it's an activity that you can help children with.
A couple of tips. First of all, remember that it is not about getting to the end and finishing the puzzle. Well, it is kind of, but the learning happens when you're actually doing the puzzle, when you're making those manipulations, you're learning about orientation and how things fit together. That's where the learning takes place. So, don't rush through the activity. Allow the children to figure things out for themselves. Obviously, we don't want it to get to the point of frustration, and there is a time when you want to step in and you want to guide. But guide, don't solve. It's great to play alongside them. You can show persistence. You can model how enjoyable this activity is, and you can also narrate for them. Talk about what they're doing, and use the language of shapes and space and orientation and movement. The more that they hear these concepts, the quicker they'll come to understand these concepts. That helps make it a very rich learning environment.
Now, the wonderful thing about puzzles is that they come in so many different kinds and shapes and difficulties. There is always a puzzle that is developmentally appropriate for the children in your care. You may be familiar with the very simple rings, ring stacking or nesting cups. Those early puzzles are really important for children to learn how to manipulate objects. But then you will graduate to puzzles proper. Sometimes there's just one or two pieces with a little handle, and then you might move on to puzzles that have more distinct shapes. And, of course, we're not limited to learning about shapes. We can learn about other things as we do puzzles. And then they graduate from there to simple puzzles, more complex puzzles, three- dimensional puzzles, puzzles that are different shapes and sizes and kinds. There's something for everybody, and there's something that will be attractive to the children in your care.
I like to ask people to think outside the box. What are other puzzles that you know about? Well, puzzles are about how objects fit together. So, this is a kind of a puzzle, and when we try and put these nested dolls back together, it's not intuitive. It's not easy. And when a child learns how to do this and then learns how to match the patterns, they're learning really sophisticated spatial things. So, that's a wonderful puzzle. Dominoes are a puzzle. Other games can be made into puzzles. But I like to say, you don't have to buy puzzles, and with the last of my time with you, I want to talk about some puzzles that you can create with objects that you probably have around the house. My children used to love to make puzzles out of little 3x5 cards. They love these little dot markers, and we would make dots of different colors, different numbers of dots, and then we would cut the paper down the middle and have a little matching game. That's a kind of a puzzle, matching similar images. And you can do images of different kinds, right? And then, you can graduate to doing complementary images. These fit together, too, but not because they're the same. It's because they complement one another, and that's more akin to the kinds of puzzles that you would purchase. It's a more sophisticated concept. It's a wonderful thing that you can do. You can also do this with photographs that you may have. You may have photographs that your children like, and they might like changing them into puzzles.
Yes, even a kitty. And what you can do is, you can take some scissors and cut that one down the middle, too. And now, you have a bunch of different images that you've cut this way. You'll find that some fit together, and some don't. And they can be more or less complex depending on colors and shapes and how many times you cut them. You can make this into your own puzzle and make it developmentally appropriate for the children in your care. I like to do silhouettes, too. Remember we talked about nesting cups. You probably have some of those in your kitchen. I like to use these, and then I can trace them, and I would ask a child to figure out which size cup goes on which silhouette. It can be more complex than it first appears, and it's a fun little puzzle that uses objects that are just right there in your house. Sorry. So, oh, wait, here, follow me.
Oh, I was setting up for a little puzzle party down here, and you can see some of the silhouettes that I put around. Some are simple, and some are more complex. I particularly like this one because it asks a child not to just match the pattern on the paper. You also have to turn the paper to make the pattern fit, so it's kind of a puzzle within a puzzle. And that's one of the great advantages of making your own. You can use your creativity to make them more complex or more simple depending on your situation. These are simple box puzzles, which I quite like, and the idea here is you simply create a confined space and then see how many of a particular object you can fit inside the space. I like this one because the top here slides and lets you know when you fit them in incorrectly or when you might be able to fit this amount in if you just put them in a different way. And that's what we're doing here. We're building spatial awareness.
You don't need a box, of course, you can just use a shoebox lid like I'm using here and some blocks that I found around the house, but you don't even need blocks. You could just cut up a cereal box and use that. Again, it's about developing spatial awareness, enjoying manipulating objects, and developing persistence and so many other skills. It's a wonderful, wonderful activity.
Finally, there is one more thing I wanted to mention. You don't even need to have a box. You can just tape out a place on the floor and then challenge somebody to see how many pieces of whatever material you're working with they can fit into that space. That's a wonderful puzzle, and it's one that I think I'm going to engage in now. So, I hope that you will make time for puzzling as you make time for play.
Thank you for your attention. [music]
When children play with puzzles, they practice memory, motor skills, geometry, and more! In this video, Dr. Dawson Nichols shares some ways that adults and children can play with puzzles together.
